they can harass you by continually sending you replies for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time (this actually happened to me twice, once with hexbear.net and another time with lemmygrad.ml).

Honestly you really shouldn’t be on an instance that federate with those places to start with.

You may be interested to read some of the ways that PieFed is advancing democratization of moderation.

Personally I’m not a fan of the way PieFed uses upvotes and downvotes to basically do statistics on users in order to profile “bad actors”. That feels like karma from Reddit all over again.

There can be many legitimate reasons why a user might downvote a lot, and a user being downvoted a lot is not necessarily problematic. They may just not be following the “hive mind”, and honestly we could use more of those users.

I like the optimism, but I’d see it before I believe it.

When a fediverse app wins, the whole fediverse wins. A rising tide lifts all ships or however it goes.