nope. You can do IP analysis to ban IP's that belong to particular VPN but you can't ban VPN tech. There are so many VPN services and so many proxies and so easy to setup your own VPN that even Netflix struggles with that.
no it's not better. It's extremely invasive as you have to fingerprint and store users fingerprint on your servers indefinitely. Not only that but all of this can be avoided by anyone with half a brain cell. Lemmy should not waste their resources on something like this, it's extremely hard to do to the point where literally nobody has a good system even giants like Linkedin. Source, I work in bot detection.
Lemmy would never get this right no matter how many people contributed and would just cause overal harm to the platform through privacy invasion and false positives.
Lemmy has a system whereby admins talk to each other and share details of ban evaders, but different instances decide what is a bannable offence and not all of the 1000+ instances are involved.
For remote actors, it seems to mostly rely on banned users not being very imaginative when it comes to naming subsequent accounts, and/or them not being able to leave a particular subject alone.
A user on an instance that's different from the instance that wants to ban them (so methods like IP logging or browser fingerprinting or whatever wouldn't be available).
The answer is spread amonst the comments you've already got.
It's a combination of regular bans, IP bans, moderators knowing the 'regulars' and recognizing their (bad) behaviour. And the Lemmy admins have a Matrix chat(?) room where they exchange info.
I had to pay in order to get on my instance. It's definitely not foolproof, but you add even just a small payment requirement to a registration and it would seem like quite a bit would fall off.