MeanwhileOnGrad

Another part is probably how Lemmy moderators are structurally cops, and All Cops Are Bastards.

Mods have a monopoly on the digital equivalent of violence (banning and deletion) and are expected and required to unilaterally use that monopoly to police the community. They have nearly unilateral discretion over how incidents are handled, and complaints are primarily taken care of through mods discussing internally.

Communities may elect their mods, but given communities are defined by those who are not banned by mods, mods can use their discretion to ban dissenters whenever they can get away with it while only banning supporters when they have to. Thus communities evolve into ones that (vocally or passively) support their mods as long as those mods aren't much more egregious than they have been so far. The vocal support then reinforces the mods' beliefs in their righteousness, justifying their strictness, until they are a police state.

Good mods get disgusted by this pipeline at some point during the process and stop being mods. Crappy mods speedrun the pipeline and become sad little kings of sad little hills. But insidious mods go through the pipeline slowly, creating an oasis of liberal stability where those that fit themselves within the mods' Overton Window can have a flourishing community (hi goat!).

And it's hard to organize servers any other way because by default with our current capitalism digital infrastructure, the admin is the owner and users are producer-consumers who have no tools to project political power beyond what the admin deigns to bestow on them. Because the users are given no way to organize politically they devolve into chaos, so the admin makes use of the tools they have and polices the users or imports the position of moderator so approved users can police the other users.

So over time, communities on the internet either collapse or have mods who grow from being willing to exist as liberal authorities to sympathizing with authoritarianism. So what anti-authoritarian doctrines there were that helped sustain the liberal oasis as long as they did start to feel naive or restrictive, while there is long precedent for silencing the complainers who rail against the edges of that increasingly less liberal oasis. And so authoritarianism arrives without fanfare, and those embarrassing rules that used to define the community are buried without ceremony.

At the start there were thousands of frogs in the pot. As it became warm, frogs started jumping out, but I did not jump because I was not that kind of frog. As it became hot, more frogs jumped out, but I did not jump because I was not that kind of frog. And now it's boiling, and my brain is too fried for me to ever want to jump anymore.