All the comments making personal attacks on me were greatly upvoted, and other reasonable and on-topic comments were downvoted. There was a delay before it occurred, and then all the comments were up/downvoted the same amount, and new ones met the same fate, so there was clearly a group of people who were notified about the thread at some point who then continually monitored it and voted on new comments.

Interesting

I’ve seen lots of criticisms of lemmy.ml, and even attempts to [dishonestly] attack the .ml developers.

Well, they are known for their agressive moderation methods: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417