I generally don’t particularly see anything wrong with this. Spam and harassment is a weak point on lemmy and we’re all just coasting on good faith that dedicated actors won’t abuse it. Having tools to detect harassing isn’t a bad thing, especially when they mention the exact cases they’re trying to handle. At the end of the day, you need to decide if you trust your admins to handle this appropriately. If you don’t, then you can always switch servers or open your own.

I don’t understand the piefed.Social people at all. Are they just making up reality as they go along?

Not really.

Yes this is very low-hanging fruit at this point. Effectively you’re attacking their whole instance in their own spaces, so this is BPR. Personally I don’t agree with banning people because they criticize your instance, unless it becomes harassment, but I can see why the .ml mods are fed up with it. There’s like a dozen of threads about bans like this every week on [email protected]