They keep begging people to come to slack so they can get forced fed the bullshit lies from the dev team. Everyone should abandon their sensored slack and talk out in the open for everyone to listen.
Joining is 100% a choice. I only encourage people to participate since that's usually where the latest news on developments happen first. Slack is a very useful tool for releases and community discussion that everyone should consider using to their advantage when they have the time.
I got banned on slack

That's very unfortunate... is there an appeal process? Not sure what you could have said or done to get banned but it's usually really 'lax in there.