Sure, they would do that, if good moderators were a thing that could exist. Which they most evidently aren’t, as demonstrated by every single example to have ever cursed the world with their existence.

What we get instead are the same old powermods from reddit, arbitrarily ruling as unelected tyrants over dozens of unrelated communities, often across multiple instances, banning users across all of them for misinterpreted comments (can’t seemingly be a moderator without having skin as thin as rice paper, and without lacking any semblance of reading comprehension) or for not agreeing with their own personal lunacies. And the worst of them are admins to boot, or even the developers themselves.

Anyone who wants to be a moderator will inevitably lack any ability to be one, and will almost certainly be acting in bad faith, if not at first then the second they’ve had a taste of their power over their petty little kingdom, and should immediately be permabanned from all instances for the safety of the users.

But obviously we can’t force anyone who doesn’t want to be one to take the position, lest they end up becoming even worse out of spite.

The point of being able to upvote and downvote, and block if necessary, is to make moderators unnecessary (not that they don’t do a good job of that themselves, of course, but this removes any possible excuse that they might be a necessary evil). That’s the lesson we should have learned from reddit: moderators are unnecessary, obsolete, and extremely harmful; they will ruin any social network they infest, and if they’re admins on top of that they’ll be several orders of magnitude worse, and enshittify the platform as much as possible.

At least here we can block their communities and instances infested by the worst of them, I suppose, cut away the worst of the cancer, but that just makes this a least worst situation, not a good or even tolerable one.