This was the first test of federation's claim that bad actors can be dealt with by instance-banning. They failed the test and without this key innovation performing to spec I no longer have faith that Mastadon is any more than a technically complicated open source Twitter.
IMO once the account was verified as Wheaton's the entire federation should have blacklisted every instance harboring a false accuser until they demonstrated they can be a functioning member of the fediverse.
Of course, there are better ideas in this thread such as removing the social proofing mechanisms which fuel tweet/toot abuse in the first place. But if we're just speaking in the nouns and verbs that are part of Mastodon's sales pitch they had a tool to address this and demonstrated they can't wield it.
IMO once the account was verified as Wheaton's the entire federation should have blacklisted every instance harboring a false accuser until they demonstrated they can be a functioning member of the fediverse.
Of course, there are better ideas in this thread such as removing the social proofing mechanisms which fuel tweet/toot abuse in the first place. But if we're just speaking in the nouns and verbs that are part of Mastodon's sales pitch they had a tool to address this and demonstrated they can't wield it.