An ActivityPub server-as-community has sanctions but lacks the prior steps: rules aren’t visible to outsiders and monitoring is purely reactive,

Compare this to Reddit, where arriving at a subreddit immediately presents the community’s identity as a first-class interface element: its name, description, rules, moderators, visual identity. The community is a navigable object that you can encounter, evaluate, and choose to join.

Lemmy communities are no different from subreddits in having a sidebar with rules, moderator lists; they even go a step further in making modlogs public. The way the article is written makes it seem like the author didn’t actually test the software they wrote about.