Power mods are one of the main problems with reddit. The same thing is already happening with Lemmy.
This is concerning because it allows for control of what becomes popular content.
For me personally, I never saw too many powermod-driven issues on Reddit (not that they didn’t occur, just that I didn’t experience them in the communities in which I participated).
One solution was to create a fork; lots of “r/actual___” or “r/true___” communities were born this way. To Little8Lost’s point, I think this will be even easier on Lemmy.
A lot of those community forks on Reddit were more related to the original communities growing too fast and then losing the original feeling than to powermods too (not all though).
I’ve been permanently banned from the League of Legends subreddit for saying a team that had caught Covid wouldn’t die because they’re young and vaccinated. In a post about them having caught Covid. And in response to someone calling it a fatal disease (which it can be for some, but really isn’t if you’re 20, vaccinated, and otherwise healthy).
Moderating is hard and requires a set of skills to run moderation cheaply. You’re probably going to have a group of known mods on Lemmy doing the same, just because mods with these skills will be sought after.
A bigger issue is that Lemmy seems to be continuing Reddit’s practice of mod rank by time only. The implementation of a guild model would be better for mod governance, as it allows for better discussions of mod policy and allow greater input from the invested community.
Of course, trigger happy bans are still going to happen as people troll and worse.
I do think Lemmy instances should have a publicly-visible setting for essentially stating how many communities someone can moderate maximum.
But I doubt it’ll be a problem for a while.