Yes, Hack Liberty closed their Matrix and Lemmy instances. Their forum post presents some alarming things on Matrix, but its Problems with Lemmy section consists only of few paragraphs on “federation issues” allegedly being the same as on Matrix (Wrong - not much of Matrix criticism is applicable to Lemmy), defederation and problems with entire Reddit/Lemmy/Tildes/other social news aggregators

There is no such thing as following users on Lemmy