They've been getting a lot more obnoxious as of late

That's right on schedule. There is a toxic mob that struggles to exist together (because they alienate themselves every time in a matter of weeks). They started on Reddit, originally collecting in chapostraphouse and got their community banned and each subsequent iteration has seen the same fate.

Then the fediverse was born and they began to self host. Now they couldn't be banned. There was lemmygrad, then hexbear and .ml. Checkmate, right?

When more serious and honest hosts saw the pattern many enabled instance-blocking so we could eliminate the source as end users.

Most genuine folks I interact with have blocked lemmygrad and hexbear. The toxic cloud of chuds knows this and have been moving into .ml sublemmy and dispersing into smaller and smaller communities to evade being blocked by users.

It's all quite interesting and funny if I'm being honest.

I wish I had a sociology degree, I'd publish so many fkn papers.