You’re lucky you haven’t had to deal with monstrous amounts of vote-brigading (and harassment) to the point that your community was being suppressed in visibility. I don’t think this is what PapaSkwat was doing at all

This is the exact reason I do it though. Most people banned from my communities are known for serial downvoting or brigading. A few were just trolling me or called me names that led to the bans, but most were repeatedly downvoting my posts across multiple communities, regardless of the subject.

Many of the names would downvote several of my posts in a row, one after another, in the exact same order within seconds of each other. That kind of repeated pattern is why I considered it coordinated brigading rather than normal voting. (I'm not saying OP did this)

Go through the first couple of pages of my modlog. You may recognize names from your own ban list: https://lemmy.today/modlog/1591101

21 of the banned names in my modlog also appear and are banned in your modlog too.

As you can see, many of the same serial downvoters have been active in both of our communities.

So at least 21 serial downvoters and trolls overlap in my community and your community. The mod logs I compared:

https://lemmy.today/modlog/1591101 (my community)

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog/1406343 (your community)