I joined Gab very early on in its development, when the devs were still running it as a reskinned WordPress site. It very much was exactly as the gp describes,

I joined Gab very early on in its development, when the devs were still running it as a reskinned WordPress site. It very much was exactly as the gp describes, though I've been told that the platform has become more tolerable as its community has expanded. I haven't check back however. Gab's public feed shows a subset of the top and hot posts, most of them look pretty tame.