At this point I think I'll leave those posts deleted. OP changed the post titles before deleting, then subsequently deleted their account and all comments, so the discussions in those posts are full of holes.
I only see Blaze in the modlog, and that user has been unbanned. If you are aware of other users that are somehow not in the modlog then let me know.
Yes, Blaze has been unbanned from the community.
It's in the "Blocked Instances" section, where it should be.
sh.itjust.works explicitly blocks Threads. They held a vote among the local users: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397
It is odd that threads.net appears on our instances page, while the same is not true for other Lemmy instances which have not blocked Threads. Lemmy.world is federated with Threads by default simply because it is not on our instance block list. I do not believe our instance has done anything special to force a link with Threads. I mentioned it in our admin chat and will update this post if I learn anything.
However, even with threads.net listed on our instances page, Threads does not seem to work with Lemmy. I am able to search and view Mastodon user profiles from lemmy.world, but it does not work for any of the Threads test profiles.
Edit: The lemmy.world database has no records for a person on threads.net. Our best guess is that a Threads user tried to interact with lemmy.world. Perhaps the process got far enough for our instance to recognize threads.net and add it to our instances list, but not far enough to create a record of the user in our DB.
Spoiler alert: the drain is just a straight pipe to a bucket below the counter.
I empathize with your situation. I'm in the same boat. Even with hundreds of subscribers, if everyone's lurking then the community gets stale and withers. Becoming a one-person content machine isn't sustainable.
Though on a brighter note, with this post you just gained a subscriber to your community. Browsing through it reminded me of how fun geocaching was. I just dusted off my old geocaching.com account from a decade ago. I'll have to take my kids out and see what we can find!