I've seen a lot of instances of people on Lemmy saying you can get banned from Blahaj for forgetting someone's pronouns. And then Ada has to come in and explain why they're wrong in their interpretation of the rules. These people were banned for good reasons, they're transphobes. But I think they misunderstand the rules of Blahaj for a legitimate reason.
It's because Blahaj doesn't have rules. It has two guidelines. Very subjective ones. People want to know what will get them banned, so they try to understand the rules of that subjectivity. The rules for what Ada considers to be empathy and inclusion. The rules of Ada's psychology. Because like it or not, with highly subjective guidelines, Ada's interpretation and understanding of that subjectivity is the rules.
And Ada didn't write the rules of her psychology in the sidebar. So people have to speculate. And people are speculating wrong, and starting arguments about it.
I think a ruleset should be a transparent explanation of how a mod team thinks about acceptable behaviour. By not having rules, Blahaj is being opaque about how the mod team thinks. And the only way for people to deal with that is to practice amateur psychoanalysis. Which is unpleasant and creates division.
If people understood how trans people think about acceptable behaviour, they wouldn't be transphobes. So the result of this system is that everyone who is banned for transphobia doesn't understand why and needs it personally explained to them. If the sidebar explained acceptable behaviour in a way everyone can understand, they wouldn't misunderstand it so often.
I think the current system is creating pointless drama.
My point is that rules do nothing to "control corruption" as you put it.
In an instance like this where there's only one active admin, the rules are fundamentally just a courtesy to the users. The owner can just do whatever they want.
It doesn't ultimately matter what their rules are. Anti corruption laws exist IRL so they can be enforced by the government on its own members, but when the "government" is one person what are they gonna do, say "welp I made a rule against corruption, guess I gotta stop being corrupt." The very concept of controls is silly.
Ada owns this space, so she decides how to run it. I like that because it means there's no room for arguments over what's technically within the rules or not. Are you transphobic/potentially harmful to the safe space? You're out.
Writing down a million rules to explain Ada's internal logic for banning people would be ridiculously infeasible because it's such a personal thing. But for people who like the way that Ada runs things, it's a nice space. Anyways, I don't particularly want "polite transphobes" here who are capable of following the rules if written out but would be horribly transphobic otherwise.
EDIT: what even is "corruption" in this context? I feel like your government analogy doesn't apply very well to this situation