I appreciate the honesty. I have brought great shame to my ancestors

No it has practically no impact. Back in the day it would. But user control means users could control how a website works. It meant we could reject ads or posts that were secretly selling us things or just political message that users controlled. Reddit and the other sites removed what it was originally for and left its dead corpse for us to feel like we're doing something.

These spaces are all mods. Mods determine what we see. Lemmy decided to implement the same corporate control the reddit evolved into rather than the more liberal/leftist origins that made it popular at the start.

Moderators are not normal people. They should have almost no say in anything. The only reason to give them so much control is if you're trying to create propaganda machine. Mods should only be there to remove illegal content and maybe protect against a brigade. Users take care of the rest. It's literally how many leftist want society to run. Yet for some reason we use this overseer type model where mods abuse power every day and we just ignore it like we're a police department. It's ok as long as it gets the job done right boys.