Totally true. I made a totally reasonable comment about a month ago (stated that women shouldn’t be hit on at the gym by randos), and I got downvoted to oblivion and the comment was spammed by 7 different users who essentially acted like I was Hitler. Then they started spamming my comment history and I had to delete all of my old posts.

Seemed like a real person was behind it, but may have been using bots to spam me.

As the fediverse becomes more and more of a feasible alternative to corporate social media, it will be inevitable that trolls and spammers will use our platform for malicious things. All we can do is to get better at moderation, maybe somehow bust these farms.

if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can

Agree. And that's been my experience here too. I made two posts critical of reddit and they each seemed to have been astroturfed by toxic reddit shills.

I think it would require a lot of active and dedicated mods and admins, which I'm doubtful is doable. I don't know that there's a fix for this but a "true block" (instead of the current "mute") might help; but there are major downsides to that type of feature as well. I wrote in a blog that it might require an advanced AI to moderate everything.

In any given public space, the pendulum swings endlessly. Or is it just a wrecking ball? Can't tell.
Anyway, nothing lasts forever. More so for human relationships else the divorce rate wouldn't be as high as it is.
As products of knowledge and emotions ranging from zero to Infinity, the variety will always divide one from the other at some point. Even twins can grow to dislike each other, let alone complete strangers.
So asking for uniformity is a lost cause from the start. Civility is enforceable up to a point. And chaos is unreasonably violent.

The obvious solution is compromise. Some like to give and take in turns, others to merge opinions into something that all sides agree to or something no one wants. Yet nothing is guaranteed to work because we simply aren't built that way.

Individuals will individualize, eventually. Willingly or not.