[bjt2n3904]

I wrote about this a few years ago, when Wil Wheaton tried to move to Mastodon, and promptly got booted from his instance by a mob.

The "heavy moderation" of IRC days is markedly different than the "heavy moderation" that exists today. Back in the day, the ircops had all the power of the ban hammer. Today, the mob has all the power, and overwhelm the admins.

The mods try to hold onto a semblance of power by pointing to a strict set of rules and codes of conduct, but the reality is the mob gets the final say in who stays or goes, regardless of what the "rules" say.

[BeefWellington]

The Wil Wheaton example is actually something that absolutely could have happened in the IRC days - a big mob flooding another channel to ban user X could lead an oper to decide the same thing (this was in fact the source of much drama back in my EFNet days).

There's nothing stopping a moderator/operator from simply blocking accounts on-instance who are erroneously flagging/reporting people.

There's also nothing stopping Wil Wheaton from finding a more sympathetic server admin or starting his own Fediverse server instances and ignoring people reporting his accounts (see also: Kevin Beaumont).