Honestly, in this day and age I consider VPN a basic internet hygiene. There are many many reasons to not trust your ISP and the wire between your home and ISP. You have moderation here, why do you even need to block VPN? I registered this account from VPN, but I somehow cannot comment from VPN? Doesn’t make much sense. I’m using paid Proton VPN servers, and btw I’ve seen Proton having a dedicated community here on this platform.
Short answer: no.
I don’t mean to be rude. The desire to use VPNs is completely understandable. Unfortunately, VPNs were being abused in ways that were detrimental to the community here. Last year there were several waves of really grotesque troll posts (CSAM, scat porn, etc.) on lemmy.world and other instances. Blocking VPNs was one of the responses that was effective in stopping those posts. The admin team has no interest in backtracking at this time.
We have unpaid volunteers donating their spare time. Nobody wants to spend their lunch break purging CSAM posts from some troll. And no users want a post to stay up for hours because the mods were asleep, at work, or otherwise not watching the Lemmy feed. (That actually happened, and is what drove me to donate some of my time here.) If law enforcement ever does come knocking, this instance doesn’t have the money or time to mount a defense.
I wish things were different. This is the unfortunate reality that this particular instance has faced. Other instances may feel differently.
To be honest, I’m not sure I fully understand how this works. What if the same troll registers on some other instance and posts the same content in lemmy.world communities? How is that different?
Yes, that is a problem. No single solution is perfect, and VPN blocks are only one tool in the toolbox. Every instance is different, and admins pick the tools that they think will work best for their situation. VPN blocking happens to be a tool that seems to have worked well for lemmy.world.
Instances that lack moderation and have a history of being used by trolls tend to get the nuclear option: they are defederated by the big Lemmy instances. That’s not ideal at all, but the tool set for Lemmy moderation is very limited right now.