@nasamuffin@tech.lgbt I doubt it's related, honestly.

Defederation has always been a thing to some degree, and a unifying factor among many of the newly-defederated instances is that they were set up by someone completely new to fedi who hadn't really learned what the cultural expectations are here.

So you get a lot of new instances with inexperienced (and often understaffed) moderation teams, that try to scale really quickly because that's what people are used to from VC-operated platforms, and then explode in a fireball when that goes wrong a few months later.

So I think it's more that "Russian troll farms" and "exploding instances" have a shared cause; that massive sudden influx of users from Twitter that was difficult for the existing community to help integrate.