To be clear, the volunteers/admins at Wikipedia are not paid either. From my personal experience in Wikimedia communities, my sincere advice is to consider and take transparency seriously.

The most important resource in volunteer spaces like this is 'trust'.

I hope you and the admin team recognize that in order to run a website like this, you also require the trust and buy-in from moderators (who are also unpaid) to invest the many hours into their communities just as you have done for the server. Hiding things from moderators, sending mixed messages, and making secret deliberations (with rumors that some admins are eager to remove large quantities of content) is really damaging for that relationship of trust.

The recent content policy changes (even before padded's leak) have been dictatorial top-down decrees. However, these unilateral rule changes are impractical/meaningless when moderators have not agreed to enforce those rules -- and I've personally experienced this (at best, only 30% of the content that I've reported for content policy violations have been addressed by moderators). Realistically, no moderator wants to enforce rules they don't believe in, and if they leave, the departure of skilled talent cripples this website and leaves communities effectively unmoderated in practice.

Please consider improving the transparency of these content policy deliberations, and at the very minimum, incorporate community moderators into the discussion and ascertain that they are in agreement with the rules before rolling out changes on the drop of a dime.

I wanted to express that I'm extremely concerned about the banning of @paddedperson and the deletion of their thread saying that they were migrating away from lemmynsfw.

As far as I can tell, @paddedperson was banned for leaking preliminary information about upcoming content policy changes from the admin discussion group. In my view, they were legitimate concerns, and retaliatory action taken against him are very concerning with respect to treatment of whistleblowers.

Can admins comment on this incident?

Truly transparent non-profit organizations (e.g. Wikipedia) typically release meeting minutes (a summary or transcript), or allow the public to attend voting meetings as part of the audience. Can the admins provide a summary or transcript of the votes taken on various decisions?