When I lived in DC this was my favorite thing to do at parties.
"Congressional Staffer? Is that like a temp agency?"
"Department of which state exactly?"
"Yeah ok buddy and I work at the irregular tetrahedron."
People would get way too upset about it.
People are naive if they think the .ml admins and devs don't intend to keep their thumb on the Lemmy scale. More instances need to take this threat seriously and defederate from .ml, and possibly even fork the Lemmy repos for when the devs inevitably decide they want to start building quiet exploits into the code. There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on