Honestly, this kind of kindness, consideration, & compassion from you is what I love about the Fediverse, where we don’t all have to agree with one another and in fact it’s arguably more fun if we start off not that way, but all along the pathway from start to finish we respect one another (potentially barring some heated moments, hopefully forgivable, and I already don’t recall but apologies if I ever did slip into that for a moment). I am told that Reddit used to be this way, before the authoritarian Huffman changed it to become mere “social media” (rather than older forum discussion board style) to increase his profits, but I barely saw it before it was gone, having joined far too late. Therefore I held out hope that I could see this in the Fediverse, which I did, then that was dashed when I encountered chapotraphouse and lemmygrad.ml, restored when I user-blocked them, and now I hope to preserve that for others to be able to enjoy it as well:-).

Fwiw I do see that you were right - this post was about differing political views, but that other post about the moderation abuses… that’s some heavier stuff that I am glad you will take time to think about. B/c it is absolutely disrespectful of the admins to the community for them to not follow their own rules, but also b/c I hope to be able to converse with you again on the Fediverse!:-)

And it is complicated - b/c without power, what good is having “rightness” of thought? And yet, the world is what we make of it, so if we all band together and say “this is right, whereas this, this we will not put up with”, then our collective might wins out. Speaking of, there is also a chance that Lemmy.ml could lose its grant over such practices, or be barred from the EU. At the very least, I see posts like the OP as providing fair warning that bad things may come in the future, so best start preparing now - e.g. by making communities elsewhere.

And the Federation model is so beautiful, that it seems worth attempting to preserve, by spreading communities out regardless:-).