They absolutely saw it coming - and have been continually posting about it for several years now. This was an experiment, and he is saying that it has now finally failed - not that after multiple years on Lemmy that it finally dawned on him that people can be mean on the internet.
In his latest message he even goes into some depth as to why it failed: it used to be containable, but after lemm.ee's shutting, all those trolls shifted over to other instances, and he simply does not have the heart to try and figure out which spammers and such that used to have one name (that he had blocked so their messages did not appear on his instance) now have an entirely different, unrelated name but are still up to their old tricks.
Which is important considering that he lives in the USA and could be carted off in a van someday without warning, just for the extremist leftist content that he chooses to host on the machine registered to his irl name (even if deriving from an outside source - but they will not care about that, only that Dear Leader's name has been besmirched).
brot@feddit.org 5 days ago
Not sure if “they should have seen it coming” really is the way to think about this. Yes, moderation is hard. Yes, it makes sense to build a team doing moderation. But let’s be honest, Lemmy is insaner than other forums due to its federated structure.