A personal instance generally doesn’t have a big reach, unless people actively follow the person who’s posting the doxxing information.* The fediverse may not be a good way to spread personal information of others, throwing up an instance like that is not much different than throwing up a website or forum.

There’s two things I can think of you can do: Contact the company that hosts the website to take it down – I’m unsure about how you go about this, but I’m sure you can find out more about that. And to report the instance to other instance admins to get it blacklisted, perhaps get it on a block list, limiting its reach and thus effectiveness. Get in contact with big instance admins, they likely have chatrooms you could join, and they might be able to help with the other step as well.

*edit: In the case of Lemmy, I suppose it would be people following a community, rather than a user directly. If moderators or admins act on the posted informated and delete it, the deletion will federate as well and any legitimate instance will automatically delete the content on their servers as well. This would also be true for Mastodon and such. If not, the above applies.

I think you’re wrong. Downvotes are literally meant to be to provide a community powered mechanism to push irrelevant content into out of view, as per the community’s purpose. They are not going to be used as part of an algorithm to push more relevant content to you specifically. Of course, that’s not how a lot of people end up using them, so whether it’s an effective mechanism is another question.

Meanwhile, I’m on an instance that doesn’t federate downvotes, so they don’t affect ranking here, maybe for the better?

Just yesterday I replied to a post where a similar question was asked, so I hope it’s okay if I just copy-paste my answer:

The best Mastodon instance is the one that aligns with your interests and values the most.

• Are you interested in tech? There’s a couple of tech-focused instances.
• Are you some flavor of LGBTQ+? Some instances do a better job at keeping out bad actors, and you can be around like-minded people.
• Are you interested in gaming? Movies? Art? Writing? Game development? Home improvement? Gardening? Activism? Memes? News?
• Maybe you’re interested in stuff happening in your country or local area?

Why? When you’re looking for new content, and new people to follow, the local and federated timelines of your instance are a good way to do so. Your home timeline includes all the people and hashtags you followed yourself, and their boosts. The local timeline includes all the posts and boosts of everyone on your instance. The federated timeline has all the content that everyone on your instance is following. (Of course you can always follow anyone you like, but I’m making a point about ease of discovering content relevant to you here.)

For this reason, just joining a big, general-purpose is less useful, since you’re just going to get a hodge-podge of random things in these timelines. Perhaps you don’t mind, but I feel like it’s good to point out this feature of the fediverse, as some people might not know, or realize this is a thing.

How? Okay, of course this is silly to recommend without giving you some way to look for these instances. There’s a couple of directories that allow you to search for them. Looking for some briefly came up with https://instances.social/, https://mastodon.help/instances and https://mastodonservers.net/. Also note you can migrate your account from one instance to another, taking your followed content and even followers with you.