[jerf]

On net, I would expect federation to work out in these people's favor. They won't do anything so obvious as simply run their own nodes which everyone will end up blocking (though that may be a small component of their methodology). But it just isn't that hard to script up some involvement across a wide range of servers, most of whom will not have any defenses whatsoever against this sort of thing, and from there do their thing. What methods get closed out are more than compensated by the vistas that open before them in a federated world.