I’m actually kind of disappointed in how popular Beehaw is becoming for this very reason. The whole spirit of federated social media is the decentralization of ownership and authority, and yet so many people are flocking to the instance where the judgement of what is or isn’t acceptable is concentrated to a few moderators. I don’t disagree with much of Beehaw’s stated ideology, except maybe for their condemnation of rationalism, but it still seems like an elitist mindset to have the values of the community determined by a select few. I think that ideally mods should be there for spam and hate speech and that everything else should essentially be community moderated via up and down votes. Limiting the community’s voting ability in favor of strict moderation inevitably leads to power-tripping moderators eventually. Sure, you can move the community to a different instance if it gets bad, but I’m not totally convinced that that’s as much of a zero-cost operation as people make it out to be. Especially if you’re talking about relocating a large community from a very popular instance.

Here’s hoping that all of the Lemmy communities grow into healthy, thriving environments away from the destructive financial interests of traditional social media, but please, let the people have their downvotes.