Every person and every platform has its biases and values, so it’s not as helpful to think of moderation and control as more-or-less, so much as what is being controlled.

For example, reddit’s revenue model led them to censor moderators during the API fiasco, and some of the communities on Lemmy since its early days are continuations of quarantined or banned subreddits. Meanwhile, most Lemmy instances take a stand against bigotry which would fly without a worry on reddit. This is a result of each platform’s values, what they as a community (or in reddit’s case, business) consider tolerable. reddit has the added constraint that they can’t alienate their advertisers and other sources of income, and face increased scrutiny from mass media (news articles are usually the cause of controversial subreddits finally getting enough attention to cause them to be banned).