I’m aware that IP bans inconvenience users who did nothing wrong. But I feel like this can be alleviated:

• make the IP ban temporary. The idea is to force the spammer to get another IP or give up, not to use the IP itself as the enforcement.
• IP-ban only account creation, not activity. So even if you’re using the same IP, as long as you already have an account, you should be unaffected.

But… well, we’re back into “lemmy needs better built-in mod tools” territory.

Then hosts need to ban VPNs.

They need to use cookies that attach a unique identifier to each machine to enforce bans per machine. Hash the cookie so it can’t be edited. If a user clears their cookies, they need to put in a special private key to get back into their account.

Or just make users scan in ID or pay with a credit card to gain membership.

None of those ideas are perfect but they are needed for better ban enforcement overall anyway.