I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn't a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have... But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let's look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
My point is really the commenter's seeming inability to find nuance. Or maybe more charitably, disinterest in finding nuance.
There's this childish kneejerk response, tuned to sound aligned with "the right side of history", that's really just people being allergic to information and ideas too different from their own. They go "ooo scary/bad! I heard about those tankies!" and just panic ban.
I've seen the same flavor of it where people who happen to have signed up to .ml, knowing nothing about the landscape and just to figure all this federated stuff out, get berated for ideas they don't share and never stated. Based on where their account is.
It's all just very shallow and much more like team sports than anything else. Virtue signalling. Which I guess shouldn't be too surprising.