Thank you for sharing this story.
Since GamerGate was mentioned, here is a link to Innuendo Studios’ analysis called “Why Are You So Angry?”, although I prefer its more broad sequel “The Alt-Right Playbook”.
Though without the kind of linked personal stories, so many people would not be receptive to hearing such analyses, so they both are kinda necessary. :-)
Lemmy.World is the largest instance, and they preemptively defederated from hexbear.net a year ago, citing several examples of user comments that they wanted to protect their own userbase from.
Many other large instances have done similarly - another one is programming.dev (statement), although in their case if was merely to prevent one-sided conversations after hexbear.net defederated from them. The funny part of that story is how the admins took a vote, which indicated an unwillingness to defederate (27 to 19) but then did it anyway:-).
Anyway, many users of hexbear.net have made quite the reputation for themselves around the Fediverse, to the point where MANY instances felt the need to defederate from the entire instance (think: Truth Social but claiming to be leftist). And at this point, many users on it seem proud of that or at least consider it part of the cost of traversing the wider Fediverse using an account based on hexbear.net.
Hey I have an idea, let’s put him in charge of… “Technology”?