I hadn't experienced hexbear (literally) shitting up the place yet, has a way to block entire instances been implemented or do I gotta find a new one that isn't federated with them?
Yeah I was using lemm.ee but the hexbear spam in the threads was ridiculous. They were swarming the meta thread discussing defederating them too, and it seemed like the instance admin was determined to keep federating with them. Went on the hunt to join a popular instance that doesn't federate with them. There's a few out there that do block the annoying authoritarian/boot-licking trifecta of lemmygrad, explodingheads, and hexbear. Sopuli.xyz was the one I ended up joining.
On Lemmy itself it hasn't been implemented, though there is an issue related to it on their github. There are clients that do it but it's client-side only at the moment.
Next update will allow you to personally defederate with them even if your instance hasn't. If you'd like. You can also very easily migrate to a new instance, if you'd prefer thaf route.