The degree to which a white person reacts adversely to being called a racist is directly proportional to how much they themselves believe the accusation has merit.

No one ever told you the whole Garden of Eden story was just a bronze-age, goat-herding allegory for puberty?

A primitive "Just So" story of ontogenesis recapitulating phylogenesis?

Synaptic plasticity

Did you at least get to know their names before fucking them?

But is there a solution to the core problem as identified here?

One of the issues in the Fediverse is that in many cases the "bad actors" and the "content moderators" are one and the same.

Among the literally thousands of active servers, many take active measures to avoid being policed.

The core Mastodon community is in deep denial. They've created a cherished narrative of "how Mastodon is", which is deeply in conflict with easily demonstrated facts, and they react badly when this is pointed out to them.