yeah, really - working as designed. If a remote site starts letting a bunch of people behave badly, then you can block them all at one go. If the remote mods clean up their act then maybe you'll talk to them again. Any user on your site who disagrees with this is perfectly free to move to another site with a policy of "100% free speech except for what the government makes us block".

It feels a little surprising for it to happen this quickly, that's all.

The "are already" wording smells like reddit PR team trying to cool usage of lemmy

Yes, I can't help but feel like this is just people learning how federated systems work. If you own the instance, you always have the power to block connections from any other instances. The whole point is that instances have control, and if you want control, you have the option to run your own instance. It's a distributed system of reputation.

Stuff gets murky when admins ban other instances based on the instances that those other instances federate with.

So if you have instance A which is federated with instance B, and if instance A sees instance C as hostile, it obviously defederates from instance C, but it would become problematic if instance A would also defederate from instance B simply because instance B is federated with instance C.