Second, it appears they have even more moderators than the instances with which they defederated. More than enough to keep illegal content off the instance. But that’s not the intended goal. They want content off the instance which is ideologically opposed to the owner. They make that clear in the instance description. They want more moderation than Reddit, which is already filled with insular ideological spaces.
The users are all very much on board with this ideological purity. They freely admit it, so I’m not sure why you would contend it.
It’s 400. Versus over 3000 linked instances. That does not sound like an insanely long list, considering how many spam instances there are and those with questionable content.
I don’t understand how this argues against my premise. This is decisive evidence that they want strict ideological adherence.
The type of person who we want as moderator don't want to be moderators. A real decentral solution needs to give power and sovereignty to the users and take it away from admins and moderators. Some group of elite privileged few federated servers with all the power, demonstrates how worthless Lemmy and fediverse are.
I think many people are just very authoritarian today, and don’t appreciate the internet as we knew it 20 years ago. They’re not content to control how they interact with the internet. They want to control how everyone interacts.