I can see why it might be appealing in a microblogging context. There it’s all about the individual and their little kingdom and having ‘followers’. I think what would happen in practice is Threads’ moderators step back and do less moderating and that will let abuse run unchecked more often. But that’s their problem, whatever.

On Lemmy/PieFed they’re not only your posts. You’re the person who started the discussion (in the community which we all built together) and the people who posted in the discussion are all co-creators of it. In this context one of the worst people to moderate a thread is the person who started it. They have the least objectivity and are the most likely to try to distort the direction the discussion goes in.