Hey /random/, I'd like your POV on my current situation, get ready for a wall of text, I have to get it all out;
Me, as context:
20/M/France, 220lbs, 6.4ft, not a gym bro yet not too fat since I'm quite tall.
Back in mid-November, what was initially one of my long-time close friends went completely haywire: he started by provoking me and our other friends in group chats, being overall dismissive of everything we said (eg. responding to every message pic. related). Since we sometimes act as such (even though, not to that extent), we didn't think too much of this.
Eventually, it was made clear that we wouldn't stop, and was more and more confrontational. I asked him multiple times if everything was fine and he just kept posting this emoji.
I was starting to get concerned that he might be sad/frustrated or something, but things took a turn when he straight-up started spamming insults to everyone across all of our group chats. Furthermore, he updated his Steam account to try and mock me personally (the profile pic. was mine with the emoji plastered on it and the name was a play on words with my username). He also added pictures mocking me for really REALLY trivial things.
Since I still was fond of him, I ignored him and let it slide, maybe in another day or two things would settle?
...Fast forward to January, and it hasn't stopped. The posting never stopped, "the trolling" either. It started to become very clear that it was personal. He was stalking me daily just to update his Steam profile to something I posted to try to rile me up. I spoke with the others and we concluded that we would have to kick him from the group chats and block him in the process, which we did. There was only one group where we couldn't kick him. And HE WENT FUCKING MAD: it was as if his new traits were amplified with now even more childish provocation, emojis, and renaming everyone to various insults. He truly devolved into something else.
A few days later or so, he finally got kicked by the group administrator. It's now February and he seemed to cut the others some slack, however, he tried every way imaginable to contact me. First, he found some old Discord group chat we had in common, and this is when I even discovered that at least three of his friends (whom I more or less knew) had been plotting against me for a while in their own group chat to try to... well, whatever they are trying to do. The spamming was relentless and was absolute nonsense: to give you a slight preview of their DEVASTATING comments, they said stuff like (eg. "Eating takeout food don't make u smartt lol!!!!!"). Anyway, this was very generic bully stuff that I wasn't relating to. However, since I still didn't want to escalate things, I figured I'd just keep blocking them. They tried to add me with alt accounts and left comments on my old YouTube channel. This eventually became unmanageable since every time I found a way to get some peace by stopping giving them attention, they just found another way to try to mess with me.
Since we knew each other well, he knows my name, but also my address (he lives 1 mile from my place), phone number, etc...
This week, they went on and trashed my professional email address that they found on my website, I've been opted-in to just about any porn website they could find with my private info. Yesterday, they also obliterated my phone number with voicemails, calls, and messages and I'm pretty sure they also leaked my phone number online judging by the insane number of scam calls I started to have. I had to cancel my plan.
I still don't know where all of this is coming from, I've been saddened by this since I cared a lot about him and I still have no clue why he does this, still trying to figure out what I might've done wrong. I tried being passive so it wouldn't escalate but it didn't calm the situation. I don't know how things will go from there.
OFC this could go both ways since I also have their Full names, Addresses, Phone Numbers, Email addresses, and even some IP addresses (not a script kiddie, but public IP still won't get me far), but I don't know if doxxing them is a good option;
I'm not sure how to proceed at this point.