Which means that other communities ran by other moderators can be created. (This breaks down probably if the moderator is like, an ISP, AWS, etc.)

Another interesting way this breaks down in practice is when communities interact.

You can observe this today on the Fediverse. A common pattern is a small group pressuring moderators of some community to ban select people, under threat of the whole community being banned by many other communities. They make good on this threat by playing all the other communities against each other, threatening each one with being banned, unless they ban the original target community.

Do you think telling people in Communist China to "make your own government" if you don't agree with their censorship is a valid argument?

Could you please stop creating accounts to post flamewar comments to HN? That's not what this site is for.

I suppose I should add: No, we don't care about your views on China. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't burn itself to a screaming crisp, and also (if we're allowed a stretch target) that doesn't suck.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Which isn't perfect but a far better outcome than the above.

Except if the moderators are in agreement with the tyranny. Then you have no views to oppose the tyrants.

Right any force of rule/law enforcement can be corrupted. That's not an argument against having rules or attempting to enforce them, even if imperfect.

"Don't worry everyone I'll be a great arbiter of information"

- Adolf Hitler when he took over the press probably