You were not the first that this happened to - they've even kicked out mods without any warning (and literally told people to kill themselves), nor will you be the last. At this point it seems to be a right of passage that people must go through, bc it is administered by the Lemmy sourcecode developers so very few instances seem to want to risk pissing them off.

Blocking especially Hexbear alone solved 90% of my issues with toxicity on the Fediverse, and blocking Lemmy.ml brings that up to like 99.9% - there are trolls elsewhere ofc, just like there are some people who might have been worth talking to on Lemmy.ml, but overall it acts like a spam filter that much improves my happiness here.:-)

Lemmy.ml is such a weird situation. Personally, I worry about the future of Lemmy when I consider who runs the circus.

It started off as the first and only Lemmy instance run by the maintainers. It was classified as general purpose, but leaned hard to the left. The maintainers are mostly Tankies, but the users are not, and Lemmygrad is created for the purpose of being focused on far-left politics. Lemmy.ml was my first instance, and I was an early user. Early on it was nice there.

As Lemmy grows, new instances appear, and eventually ML is not the largest, just the oldest. As that happens, the original intent of the ML TLD choice starts to become visible, as the instance shifts from general purpose to an instance for "Marxist Leninists" just like Lemmygrad. Early users have now mostly migrated elsewhere because it is no longer the "flagship" instance.

Now we're in a position where the majority of Lemmy users exist on non-ML instances, and think that the ML instances are run by morons, yet those morons maintain the codebase that runs every Lemmy instance.

It's a ticking timebomb. I expect we'll all be on Kbin by 2030 after something boils over and the Lemmy maintainers start fucking around with the code to get their way.