I tried to appeal mine, but unlike you they wouldn't give me an answer or even tell me what grounds it was on. The second and third appeal got no replies, period.
That is just one long big bad joke. Something similar happened to me.
Btw, how do you know it was the streeview link that did it even? Was it just the timing? Could have been a coincidence. I almost wonder if they're using some machine learning crud to figure out who to ban, and the machine is just giving random stupid answers and no human is checking to see if it's valid.
Your lemmy account should work from there, but you might have to search the magazine for the post in that case. I'm not sure how to do a fediverse link to a specific thread/comment, let alone one that works on lemmy.
Wonder if that's actually what affected the timing? The John Oliver protests were drying up perhaps? Losing protest traffic - so they reopened r/Place now in the hopes of getting folks to come back to reddit to protest one more time, on redrdit itself, while increasing traffic and ads revenues.
Wonder if the lack of an API for kbin affected the article? (kbin will have an API, it has it already technically, but more dev work is needed before it's ready, but it's just a growing pain as kbin is newer than lemmy, this is also why there are more apps for lemmy than kbin.)
Likewise with Beehaw - it's just a lemmy instance, but they've defederated with so much of the rest of the fediverse that perhaps to a newcomer it feels like an island.
Doesn't excuse the shoddy journalism but if we know why these mistakes made it to print then maybe we can come up with a way to do something about it.
It was brilliant.