Not ban-free, just easier to not care if you get banned by an idiot as you can make your own community with the same name on a different instance if you think a moderator is being dumb, and can move your account to a different instance if an admin is being dumb. If other people think you're doing a better job, then your new community will outgrow the older one.

With reddit, there's only one community with each name, one set of admins, and one way to access things, so if something like this incident happened there, anyone affected would be totally fucked.