I’m sure there are some folks who’ve lost trust, but I haven’t lost trust in them, and I doubt I’m alone. You are the person spearheading this line of conversation. There’s a few folks here who agree with you sure. But I think your suspension was justified.
Additionally, the equivalency that is being made between suspension, and “ban” is really disingenuous. You were suspended for 3 months due to your persistent behavior in that thread after many other community members made multiple attempts at reigning in the bombastic language used there. You say you weren’t contacted, but multiple times people tried to help reduce the high emotions in the conversation. It might have been soft skills, rather than “an official moderation statement with a moderation tag in a big moderation font” but it was still an act of moderation.
I object to the notion that there is not trust, and I object to the constant equivalency between “ban” and “suspension”. With respect to suspending you from the project vs dpo: By your own comments, you evaded the suspension:
You’ve been here for ages. I can, easily, see moderators going, “Hey we want to stop the hot emotions on our forum and give time for people’s emotions to cool off and empathy to return. But we don’t know if blocking some of the users we’ve had reported to us from DPO will cause them to jump to github issues to evade the moderator action. And given their history in the community, we have reason to believe that may happen.”. The scope of the suspension might have been large due to your behavior on DPO emphasizing you won’t change your ways in this space.
It also might have been large in scope because, by your own words, you carry a lot of weight. And the impact of your behavior might have been much larger than by a random user. You’re at least aware of the impact of your words and how it’s larger than an average user.
As to why an action was taken at all:
There may be valid reports from users in private explaining how some behaviors have made them feel unwelcome. There are people who have not engaged in these conversations who paid attention, and likely have chosen not to participate here. And it’s possible there’s a reason some of their reports aren’t being made public. That might not be something that the Steering Council, Conduct Workgroup, or moderators are ethically allowed to disclose on behalf of a reporter. Whatever took place, those three bodies made of multiple people in our community all agreed on the actions.