I was glancing through the mod log and saw these two entries. Conspiracy theory communities were both removed for violating rule #3.
What are these rules? If I look in the side bar, rule #3 on both lemmy.ml and sh.itjust.works to me looks like no porn. So why were conspiracy theory communities not allowed? That seems like kind of a community that shouldn't be an issue on Lemmy... are conspiracy theory subs really something that won't be allowed here? Honestly that's kind of disturbing to see already...
Lemmy.world (where OP's account is) has a rule 3 stating:
No posts or comments supporting or promoting QAnon related content or similarly disproven conspiracy theories. Moderators have sole discretion to decide if a post violates this rule. Birds are real. The Earth is round. Get over it.
See https://mastodon.world/about (both world servers are maintained by the same admin team, and lemmy.world links to that page for its rules).
Your terminology is super confused, but the lemmy.world admins did remove those specific communities on lemmy.world in particular. They're unaffected on other servers, and other communities from these servers continue to replicate to lemmy.world unimpacted.
I knew users can block specific communities from their feeds, but I figured the admin level was just defederating from the instance as a whole, like beehaw did.
I don't run an instance and don't have a lot of experience with exactly what's possible, but the screenshots in this post pretty clearly show community removal and not defederation... and the communities aren't removed on their home servers. So I infer the lemmy.world admins must have been able to do it... and did so.
I said in my post that unless there's rules elsewhere I'm just not seeing, the rules on the main instance sidebars for #3 simply say "no porn". So what does that have to do with conspiracy theory communities?