I don’t care about intent either, and I think that you’re right not caring. I think that our major point of disagreement is fairly small - if being a public area already offers enough context to make it a dogwhistle. I think that it’s still in the area where that implicature (“this is a free speech area” +> “rev up those hate discourses”) can be cancelled.
And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn’t want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they’ve attracted the attention of now - and chased away.
Yeah - regardless of dogwhistle or not, it was a fucking stupid move. Someone mentioned in the thread that nicknames like “arian1488” are already starting to pop up; if they aren’t looking for this sort of user, they just made expurging them 2000% more difficult.