A lot of Lemmy mods, especially on Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world, see themselves as arbiters of what people are and aren’t allowed to say.

It’s very weird. It is the Reddit model that they’ve inherited, and you can avoid it to a certain extent by just avoiding those communities and instances that tend to do things that way. But I think at the end of the day that this model of moderation is simply always going to have this failure mode attached to it. It’s a silly thing for anyone to agree to who is an adult who can speak their mind unmonitored by a chaperone who is approving or banning each message like some sort of schoolmarm overseeing the class discussion and ordering someone out if they get out of line. We only put up with it because most mods are fine, the damage is slight most of the time, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

I wrote more on the topic in this exact community a while back if you want to read. I plan to write up a part 2 which includes some guesses for what could be done about it. If you want, I can send you a note when it’s written.