Yeah, the whole thing is out of bounds imo. Mind you, as far as I can see, you had comments deleted, which isn’t the same degree of problem as bans. If it also came with an explanation at the time of removal, then it would be doable as a mod team adapts on the go. I don’t have the ability to see any private messages, and none are visible in the thread itself though.

It’s like I said elsewhere, there is no place in the community that I could find where any of these reasons for removal/bans are listed. Since whether or not stating what is a simple fact of the system as it exists is considered a support of that system, and it is part of a nuanced statement that is at least as much a condemnation of the existing system, that being a reason for mod action of any kind would need to be explicitly listed.

I have nothing against strict moderation at all, any dedicated C/ needs it just to stay on topic. A political C/ needs it to stay on topic even more. But the rules have to be spelled out up front, as do the intended actions for a given rule. It might make sense on a private server/forum, but on lemmy, you can’t even rely on visitors being from the same instance.

Moderation ain’t easy, and it ain’t simple. Moderating hot button topics is even more chaotic. Seriously, something like this post is inevitably going to be bonkers behind the scenes. To me that means you make any decisions transparent, be up front, and not moderate your own posts to avoid impropriety.

My stance is that the community needs to have the rules established ASAP. If the mods want to just set the rules and enforce them, that’s their choice and the users’ choice to use the C/or not. If they want to communally establish them, then it needs to start NOW rather than later because the C/ is guaranteed to have topics like this posted regularly. You can’t put off the building of community consensus until after something goes wrong and hope for it to not end up biting you in the ass.

You can do that in an authoritarian system, and anyone that doesn’t like it can bugger off, but trying that in a leftist community would be kinda silly. Doing it in an anarchist leaning community directly goes against the principles of anarchism, imo. You can’t make anarchism work if you’re using authoritarian methods. It just isn’t anarchism at that point. Same with other leftist systems tbh; once you centralize power, you defeat the purpose.