Here's my super serious thoughts and my attempt at effort posting. I have fibrofog pretty bad right now so apologies if I ramble or make shit points.

I think one of the big lessons here is to avoid having power-users. The initial, relatively small, issue was quickly blasted out of proportion when it could have been stopped by a simple "We're sorry, while we didn't intend to say those things, our intent is irrelevant in the face of our actions. We'll work on it and get back to you." along with unlocking the comms and involving users more in the process if the issues with the comms are really so severe. I still think the tanks should be unlocked until a choice is made, as a show of good faith. It'll do a lot to assuage fears that they don't care, and show that the top down community defining isn't going to be how things are done in future.

The second big lesson is that moderators and admins need to be vigilant of resentment toward users building up. I've been a moderator for a very active community before, and it sucks. You do see the worst of the community and that can lead to resentment and cliquishness. The other mods understand, the users don't. It makes it easy to mentally create an in group and out group, we're all humans, and the human brain sucks ass at most things. Perhaps moderators and admins should be strongly suggested to take time off and be a regular user on occasion to prevent this? Obviously there are privacy concerns, and the admins need to protect themselves from doxing, so I'm unsure how to implement this.

I think that overall this might have been a good thing. It's clear to me that there were tensions bubbling below the surface just waiting for this to happen, and now that it has we can identify and rectify those tensions better. A learning experience is always a good thing, even if they rarely feel good in the moment. In fact, they usually feel absolutely terrible in the moment.

AlaskaBall banning themself as a bit and then accidentally misgendering themself is funny in retrospect, but seemed to confirm the idea that there was a shadowy take-over of transphobic mods. Very poor timing as a thing to do, but great comedic timing. People are already looking back and laughing on it, so I don't think that'll be anything long term.

The cult of personality being character assassinated is a good thing in terms of my anti-power-users stance, but a bad thing in that TC69 did stumble face first into this, and didn't instigate it(though she clearly made it worse). She obviously did some great things for the site before my time, and the outcome of her actions is part of what drew me here. It's a space that isn't shit, and she helped build that and should be recognized for that. She shouldn't have returned from such a long break and been given admin straight away. Admins should be people who are currently active in the community, not niche internet celebrities. The fact that she was given admin right away strongly supports the idea of adminship being a big club that you ain't in, which I'm sure the admins don't want.

I'd say there's no hard feelings, but there are a few. I'm willing to try and work through them though. I can't speak for others who are less willing to, and I know I wasn't hurt as much as the others were. I'd have preferred an apology from her directly, but if deleting and purging her account was the choice she made, then I respect that and wish her well. But as said, I can't speak for others.

As others have said, there's also the issue of assuming all he/hims are A: white, B: cis, C: het, D: men, and E: wrong for having those pronouns. This loops back to the resentment thing I mentioned earlier I think. Brainworms are part of the human condition in our world today, it's not your fault for having them, but you do need to put effort into removing them. This is a very hard process that feels shitty in the moment, because you have to catch yourself and stop yourself. Telling your own brain that it's wrong is difficult. Self improvement feels like shit a lot of the time.

Large amounts of users also cited the demographic surveys that show Hexbear to be very white, and seemed to use that to excuse the assumptions, which was clearly quite hurtful to our POC comrades. I'm white, and thus not very qualified to talk on this issue, but I felt it was very worth noting that harm so that it isn't forgotten and can be worked on.

From what I've seen, Lyudmila and CARCOSA have been handling the aftermath quite well I feel. Putting yourself as the face of an unpopular group is very difficult and I'm sorry for the stress you've likely felt.

That's my wall of text. I hope we can all move forward together as better people, better comrades, and better posters to build a better community and world(eventually.)