Federation works against mod abuse. A mod can only abuse their power on one board. If enough people get sick of it, they’ll leave for a different one and it will be almost frictionless (discounting defederation issues).

Landlords (a rough analogy but bear with me) only have power due to the friction of packing up all your belongings and going elsewhere. Lemmy has about the minimum friction you can have. I have entire instances blocked. I don’t need them. I can find people discussing my interests on a dozen other servers.

In theory, Reddit isn’t much different. Don’t like one subs mods, join a different sub, but Reddit itself kinda puts its finger on the scale there. Plus, fuck Reddit’s API changes. They own communications infrastructure, they don’t own the thought’s and minds of users, but they act like they don’t understand that.