there can be a website where the mods are well respected by its populace, but it has to be a site where the mods are citizens of the town that they run. they must be capable of being friendly with all of their people. which means such a site is unsustainable if it gets too big. as soon as the mods are unable to connect with their users, they cannot serve them. thus, a citizen-mod is incompatible with infinite-growth social media.
in fact, the only kind of community moderation that "works" on a huge website is the kind where the mods are completely isolated from their users, unable to perceive what their populace find wrong with the experience, never seeing anything from their point of view. but of course, the kind of people who want to run a site that big are the kind who *want* to be citizens of it, which means they're inevitably going to be insufferable asshats.
i am, in fact, posting this here instead of on bsky (where it's more relevant) because bsky is having some bizarre problems and not letting my posts go all the way through.
And yes, I *could* stand to post on Here more. Maybe what I need is more cool people to follow. Assuming the cross-instance follow function works. I keep running into instances where it doesn't. 
@wildweasel most of the time that it doesn't it's cause the asshat mods of the other instances blocked us, i find
@wildweasel oh yeah absolutely
@wildweasel and, it's by design
the server absolutely can tell when someone blocked you
this has been discussed years ago and they came to the conclusion that it would be more respectful to personal sensitivities (or some bullshit like that) to not have a message for when you are blocked, and instead just display an empty profile
@mavica_again i think the biggest problem with the entire fedi thing is that it won't just tell me as a user when that's the case, it just throws errors like they don't exist.
interconnected ecosystem, my ass