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’m very understanding and sympathetic to the fact that running large communities is difficult.
My impression of the current situation is that trust is especially low between community mods/contributors and the admin team. The only way to repair that trust is through transparency, and I would suggest that your team implement as many measures as possible.
For example, mastodon.world discloses all of their finances.
Content banning and user banning processes need publicly posted procedures. How many warnings does each user get? What is the appeal process like? Banning of communities or users should never occur unless it is in violation of an existing policy. It is not okay to change the rules and ban simultaneously (e.g. as was done with c/scat or c/rapehentai). Instead, provide some advance notice. Ideally, suspend before banning. Provide the banned community or user with information about why they were banned.
In a situation like this, where there is so much wild speculation about the content policy, my honest opinion would just be to make the entire process transparent. For example, I used to write minutes for the mediawiki community I was in and sometimes I would publish saved IRC logs. Example minutes:
Although I suppose it was more important for our community to track all the minutes because we were a volunteer community with elected admins. However, for the situation that you are in, I really think it would be beneficial to pursue transparency to that degree.