Yes, but since you had many forums, you could move to one with more relaxed admins. They had no dependency. On Lemmy, instances are connected and there is pressure to have the same moderation rules or you get defederated because your instance is now creating discussions that leads to reporting of users on other instances.
I had high hopes due to the defederated nature of the technology, but first thing that happened was that instances with different views started to defederate… That wouldnt be so bad if not all content came from just one or two large instances, but since it does, the entire network is now depending on them to survive.
This is 100% caused by every website about Lemmy linking to Lemmy.world, so that’s what users pick. It can be argued that there was very good intent behind this, giving users an instance with experienced admins to start their Lemmy adventures. But the downside of this is the very controlled, centralized nature of the Lemmy network now.