In the early days the internet was a free, egalitarian space for anyone to surf. Now, commercial interests rule – but users do still have some control.
That doesn’t prevent power hungry mods from modding hundreds of communities, or mods or admins from enshittifying the most popular communities (or whole instances) with absurd rules or misinformation bots, or any other of the abuses that were rampant on reddit and even more rampant here… sure, the users can migrate to some other community or instance, but most won’t (and migrating instances is significantly more work than simply unsubscribing from one subreddit and subscribing to another).
It’s not, because you can easily get around bans. You can go to a different instance and resubscribe to all the same communities.
That doesn’t prevent power hungry mods from modding hundreds of communities, or mods or admins from enshittifying the most popular communities (or whole instances) with absurd rules or misinformation bots, or any other of the abuses that were rampant on reddit and even more rampant here… sure, the users can migrate to some other community or instance, but most won’t (and migrating instances is significantly more work than simply unsubscribing from one subreddit and subscribing to another).