Theres still lots of moderation on Lemmy*.world* go to a smaller instance more aligned with anarchist free speech and you can say all the no-no edgelord things.
I havent seen a lot happen if a mod goes off the deep end though. If a system can be broken in a way, its inevitable it will be. This place wil be captured by the same special interests reddit has, I'd bet money on it. But, I'll enjoy it till then.
Its so much easier to jump ship to another ship than a whole other platform though. on top of that the instances rely on community support to run past a certain size.
Oh, I mean, power tripping moderators has always been a thing, even in my phpBB forum days when I was a teenager. I’m sure some of us older than I will have similar stories about it happening on certain BBSes. But the user base and therefore impact of that moderation going to shit was much more limited in most cases.