No, wait, hear me out.
No moderation isn't acceptable. Really. (If someone wants to make a counter-assertion, I merely point to this site.)
Non-transparent, corporate moderation doesn't seem palatable to anyone. There are just too many pitfalls.
Independent moderation falls apart when you consider that different fora have different moderation requirements. (A forum for Cinderblock the obese cat is going to be very different from any kind of political or technical site.)
The best case seems to me to be case-by-case, transparent moderation with precedents, similar to common law. And ultimately, I expect transparent moderation to, in the extreme, go to the court system, so that's not necessarily a bad starting point.
Unfortunately, that falls apart when large numbers of participants are (including, say, moderators) are not speaking in good faith. I see two possible ideas to address that: First, to tie accounts to physical identities (but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous), to cut the number of bots, multiple accounts, etc. Second, to attach an account to a user's reputation (which does break anonymity). The results I see are to cut down on the volume of crap while ensuring users have skin in the game (with a side order of making legal action against stalking, harassment, and threats).
But what about those situations that require anonymity? Most of those already have legal and social protections: psychological, religious, and legal counseling, for example. I would support anonymity for those fora, which places responsibility for moderation on the fora, of course, as well as meaning that the moderation cannot be transparent.
One area does require special handling: whistleblowing. It does require anonymity, and does not have any current legal or social protections. That needs to be fixed.
But anyway, as a general rule, the default for social media should not support anonymity. The only way to free providers like Facebook, Reddit, this site, or AWS from responsibility for what is posted there is to place that responsibility on the actual posters---having no responsibility doesn't work, and giving that power to the discretion of the owner of the provider isn't acceptable.
There are some objections that I think I can answer, but this comment is getting too long for me, so I'll wait until anyone cares.
And no, the irony of Parler's requirement of photo-ids and (allegedly) SSNs isn't lost on me.