I ran a Minecraft server for a couple of years from 2012-14.
It got pretty popular; ran it for my n eph e w on my laptop.
at one point I had to enact censorship rules because some of the American kids were offended by the Australian kids saying “Cunt” all the time in the middle of the night (which was after school their time).
Of course in Australia Cunt is not a big deal; in the USA, it’s a huge deal.
So, what I did is make it easily breakable; c u n t would bypass it among other things etc and I would have it say funny words instead “if they wrote “cunt” it would say “cheese” or something like that) – maybe 50-60 words I did I think).
They had the freedoms I allowed which were broad. I had anti-bullying but out of 27000 players total in two years, only ever had to ban 1 or 2 people and that was a whole soap opera situation.
I ran it how I’d run a society because it was a society; very hands-off, minimal. For a whole year of operation, they thought I was dead or missing and I had someone else running it and they didn’t run it exactly as I would but I had wide parameters of what i thought was acceptable.
My main point is: No matter how free I appeared to make it or didn’t make it, whether they noticed me there or not, I had the say. It wasn’t freedom but “I’m letting you”.