I call BS on the "capricious bans". Tildes bans rarely (only one person has ban power on the site), and when it does, there's some discussion around it.
Occam's Razor: If someone got banned, it's more likely that they were being an asshole than that the admin of a site that's been running peacefully and smoothly for 4-5 years is suddenly on a power trip.
Takes somewhere between 48 hours and a week to generate the first invite codes, though. (Those are the two closest moments at which I checked before and after I had invites available)
Tildes is great but it's a lot more analagous to HN than reddit.
The moderators are limited in number and absolute in power, you can't make new subs (I asked for a few and was declined), and the community is more tight and discussion-oriented (which is a good thing IMO, but I never quite felt like I fit in so I don't comment often).
It has some nice things going for it, but it has a few issues that can be off-putting.
1. People are discouraged from being too negative about posts, but posting negative articles is fine. This led to people occasionally linking articles containing invectives about some subject they didn't like, but you're not supposed to respond to the article with invectives. It produced a natural asymmetry in the conversation and felt really passive aggressive.
2. The long post format is a noble goal, but personally I couldn't see the incentive in putting in a ton of work to craft a thoughtful, researched, and thorough post only to have it read by maybe 20 people then buried after a day. If I'm going to put that much work into a piece of writing, I'll create a blog where it will at least have some more permamence. I think in the end the long post format attracts people who enjoy the process of writing itself--which is fine--but it simply doesn't equate to higher content. A lot of the opinions in those long posts are still underbaked, and the length doesn't improve them. Tildes threads can be a grind to read while producing little information.
My email has been public for ~10 years and running on Google Workspace for just as long. I get roughly 2 spam emails / day. Maybe 1-2 false negatives and false positives per month (both these rates have been getting worse with gmail).