I find this kinda similar to moderation on Reddit and 4chan for example, maybe a bit less bad. Here you have transparency with mandatory reasons for every action, and there you can get banned for anything including moderator’s bad mood, but the big difference is: they don’t even have to explain their decisions and 4chan even has a rule like “you are not allowed to discuss moderators and moderation”. But the real deal breaker here is that you can simply avoid instances with that kind of thing going on: register on another instance and prioritize communities from other instances - and you’re mostly out of reach of those mods and any of their moderation actions. I escaped from lemmy.world in the first two weeks. Still subscribed to some communities there, but mostly in a passive way and prefer to participate in alternatives.