idk whether this is the right place to ask this stuff. when i see people getting banned, i often go through their mod log to check out what they got banned for. oftentimes, the bans are reasonable, i.e. if it's a 2-day old account with 0 posts and 15 comments and all of these commends are offensive.
so i went through @13igTyme@piefed.social 's modlog and didn't really see much reason why they got banned:
sure, they posted 5 combative comments, but they posted 1000 comments in total, and the last mod log entry before that was 5 months ago. i find it a bit excessive to ban an account for 73 years for that.
i'm just generally uncomfortable for people getting banned without much of a reason. lemmy already has few users (and it seems they're getting fewer) and needlessly banning users who contribute a lot of comments surely doesn't help there. i hope you can see my point.
I can see the IP address of every local account so it is extremely easy to tell when someone has two accounts. This is fine, normally, but 13igtyme was using their second account to downvote someone that else that his first account was arguing with. This is vote manipulation and a violation of the terms of service.
I sent their main account a DM saying "Please do not make extra accounts to downvote people you argue with". They didn't respond but a day later I noticed a rude message in their bio, directed at me. That, combined with the vote manipulation, combined with the history shown in the modlog, was enough to bring down the hammer.
Normally vote manipulation is enough to warrant an instant ban and my only regret is not doing that immediately. But I tend to be lenient towards local accounts with a long history.