Luckily I haven’t been exposed to much of that behaviour on my local instance. Which instances/communities are you finding all these jerks at? (I’ve blocked a couple for unrelated reasons so maybe I’m not seeing them.)

There’s also some element that “alternative sites” tend to accumulate the people banned from the primary site. Luckily the strong left-leaning initial crowd kept most of the bigotry at bay during the formative years, but I really dislike that in general-purpose instances, many have failed to create much original culture distinct from reddit. Lemmy isn’t reddit, and that can be a good thing.

Real-space example: a women’s-only art installation/lounge. It was only a matter of time before it went to court. I think at one point they (perhaps jokingly) proposed converting it to a bathroom to allow legal discrimination. (and that still wouldn’t be the smelliest exhibition in Mona)

https://mona.net.au/stuff-to-do/art/the-ladies-lounge