This would be too slow to solve the immediate problem, but it's something more long term to think about.
Yes and I think it is important to emphasis that we should treat this as a problem that we must address on the fediverse level long term and not just a local site quick fix. This issue is basically a classic example of the tactics reactionaries use to dupe naive libs. Our critics tone police the public posts of hexbear users reportedly not civil enough in our defense of the marginalized all while the criticizing instances are hosting those conducting harassment campaigns in private.
This sort of behavior can so easily continue invisible to those that it does not target and indeed it was invisible to me until this thread. What is great about hexbear is that this thread will be taken seriously as were previous incidences of private harassment (ie: TC69 vs downvotes). On other instances that are run by more reddit brained individuals I do not have the same confidence that such voices will be listened to.
That is why our solution should be tools that can be upstreamed to lemmy, particularly ones that can be applied by individual users. In this way even instances that defederate with us will still be haunted by our specter.
picking your fights and only engaging when you have an advantage is just basic strategy though. if they had the sense to do this on the geopolitical level as well then they wouldn't be an empire in decline but here we are.