We very often see the same username created across many instances
Guilty as charged. I’ll say though, there are several legitimate reasons why one might want to do this. I personally use it as a substitute for Reddit’s multireddit feature, by grouping community subscriptions across different instances by theme. As long as users use the same username across instances I don’t think this practice should be automatically regarded as an attempt to sockpuppet. It that was the goal, the accounts would definitely not be using the same username across all the instances.
Personally I have accounts on multiple instances because I wanted to make communities in different languages and some instances focus a lot more on one language than others and also because the SFW instances defederated the NSFW ones. I do not really interact with the same posts though.
I didn’t intend to imply that by using the same username across instances you were breaking some sort of rule. Different instances have different moderation policies, different federation policies, and different intents. Having multiple accounts in good faith should not be an issue and was not what I was trying to imply.
Rather, the intention was to show that we know bad actors do this with nefarious intent. Here’s an example (they show zero comments as they have been banned with content removed - also I think these ones only had posts not comments anyway):
Guilty as charged. I’ll say though, there are several legitimate reasons why one might want to do this. I personally use it as a substitute for Reddit’s multireddit feature, by grouping community subscriptions across different instances by theme. As long as users use the same username across instances I don’t think this practice should be automatically regarded as an attempt to sockpuppet. It that was the goal, the accounts would definitely not be using the same username across all the instances.
Personally I have accounts on multiple instances because I wanted to make communities in different languages and some instances focus a lot more on one language than others and also because the SFW instances defederated the NSFW ones. I do not really interact with the same posts though.
deleted by creator
I didn’t intend to imply that by using the same username across instances you were breaking some sort of rule. Different instances have different moderation policies, different federation policies, and different intents. Having multiple accounts in good faith should not be an issue and was not what I was trying to imply.
Rather, the intention was to show that we know bad actors do this with nefarious intent. Here’s an example (they show zero comments as they have been banned with content removed - also I think these ones only had posts not comments anyway):
Removed by mod