Hmmm. I feel like you may be a bit harsh here. I agree that the mod is free to do what they want, and generally don’t think community diversity is bad (though I lean toward some form of consolidation around this kind of community, or at least better organisation).

But for a nascent and small platform like the fediverse, talking about how we organise ourselves is almost always a fair topic of conversation IMO, for the simple reason that self-organisation is exactly what the fediverse is about, how it was made and how it will thrive.

And was it really against the rules? “Self promotion”? The suggestion was for a merger with a community where I’m not sure Blaze had anything personal to gain. So not promotion or for themselves?

I can’t shake the feeling that this is all very Reddit thinking, that makes more sense at their scale and with the more rabid behaviour and territorialism you’d get there. There, shutting down conversations like this makes sense as an immune response against potentially toxic bad faith actors. Plus, the number of users there is such that community building is easier.

But here? That might be an auto-immune disorder. People take ownership on the fediverse and have the opportunity to think about how things should be and even make that happen (beyond just starting a new community that is). Letting that all play out in conversations seems fundamental, and removing comments or banning users for trying to have organisational conversations may just be anti-fediverse as much as it might seem like reasonable community moderation, at least if we’re still doing things the Reddit way.

Ideally, perhaps, there’d be a good meta-community community for people to talk about these things without moderation concerns being triggered.