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.
This is mostly used for banning of new users (usually AI bots, trolls, spammers) rather than as a rule. I don't know if rimu's data detects that, but it does specifically note the average account age of a banned user from piefed.social is much younger than most other instances. But the "delete user" bans do show in the mod-logs from piefeds perspective.
I know they're in the modlog. That's how I know about them. I think the PHP command used would not have counted them. When I, as a browser user filter the piefed modlog page by the term used on the PHP command, it excludes delete_user entries.