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.
When lemm.ee shut down, all the "free speech" incels (to whom no means create a new account and keep going) had to go somewhere. Never mind that it was the weight of all that toxicity that caused lemm.ee to shut down... just create a new account and keep going. And hexbear was defederated from so many other instances, it just makes sense to create an account on an instance that is friendly to HB but that also can reach the rest of the Threadiverse - they want to have their cake and eat it too (which makes sense, I would too in their place, and in fact I strongly considered making an account on dbzer0 myself in the past, thinking that it had defederated from HB but that turned out to have been merely a technical glitch, I think due to HB having lost its domain name at one point).
I made this image a few days ago but it seems to still fit here as well:)