Again, the point is that nobody can ever stop you from running a community as you see fit, unlike reddit, which easily ban you and your community for any or no reason. And if your community is run well and the other has indeed power-trippin mods, the people will come to yours, as has happened multiple times before. So no, it’s not the same shithole, unless you make one.
Not the same shithole, a more decentralized one.
And if shitty moderation would mean people leave, reddit wouldn’t have any users. Alas…
People do and have left communities in the past. /r/Marijuana to /r/trees comes immediately to mind and there have been many many others. But leaving for an entirely different service has a way higher executive cost. Once people are in the fediverse however, the cost to switching primary communities is not that high, and we’ve seen that away when people moved from !risa@startrek.website to !tenforward@lemmy.world due to mod actions.