In addition, mastodon, and even the protocol, has a lot in place to mitigate targeted harassment by a community.

Individual Instance blocks, where a user can block an entire instance are in place. Instance blocks on your instance, where an admin blocks another instance for all the users of that instance. And, community driven, blacklists where an admin can copy paste from.

Even more interesting, is that some instances block any instance that in themselves don't block another instance. In practice, this means that if you don't block Gab, there are a lot of instances that don't want to talk to you.

This works. This gives people the freedom to pick and choose or to move somewhere where they have more or less freedom to listen to others.