It’s definitely all of the above.

Hexbear is particularly vexing to me. According to the fediverse observer they’re less than a month old and yet have already become one of the most active instances.

outside of running your own instance, asking your instance’s owner to block them, or joining one that already has the offender on the blocklist, no. It’s requested a lot though so it’s probably on the todo list

of course the one person in europe who owns a pickup would park it on the sidewalk

idk, im surprised it took this long. there’s a huge variety of admin teams with varying degrees of security awareness and it’s been over a month since the first big influx of users started. it’ll happen again too and probably not before too long

Full disclosure, I don’t know a ton either, but my guess would be that making even more calls like that would make server load even worse

Addressing what Jamie said as well: they won’t see the downvote on their instance, but you will see it on yours.

My understanding is that each instance has its own copy of every post, comment, and vote total. You might notice that viewing the same post from lemmy.ml vs lemmy.world, it’ll have a different point total, some comments missing, and maybe different comments and posts altogether. This is because when a user interacts with Lemmy, the instance will send out a notification to other instances that the interaction happened–once. If another instance is down or busy and misses the notification, there’s no system in place to correct it later. So when you have a situation like now where a massive influx of users is causing the biggest servers to go down constantly, those notifications are constantly missed. And if you send a downvote to a server that has them disabled, that particular server simply won’t read the downvote.