The character of an internet forum - opinions, please?

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I'm a member of an internet forum about cats, where posts are routinely edited by the mods if something you say doesn't make them look good or if there's even the slightest hint of criticism of any of their rules. It's also forbidden to post that you're leaving the forum if the reason for leaving is dissatisfaction with the website, and those posts would be instantly removed anyway. You post on a forum, then they extremely often move your thread to another forum and don't inform you, nor do they tell you which or why - and the decision doesn't seem logical in many cases. If you post a thread on a topic that they feel might bring controversy, they remove it or lock it, and do this extremely often. Posts are edited constantly for font, spelling, etc. etc.

My question is whether I'm the only person who would find such a place hostile and nasty?

Sounds bad. Maybe you should quit.

Depending on their TOS, I wouldn't last 5 min in a forum like that. If I create a topic and decide to track it, I at least need to know where it moved to. Sometimes the "why" can be logical and obvious, but in cases where it's not, I'd hope to get a response from the mods if I asked about it. Also, I get why they'd need to keep a forum as hostile-free as possible. Let's be honest, people can say and do really questionable things on the internet, but the way the moderation of hostile-free is being done (or at least gauging from how you're describing it, OP) is incredibly ironic, as in being extra careful towards hostile posts puts users under the impression the mods are the hostile ones. Kind of an interesting scenario, really.

To me it sounds like a dictatorship, based on the huge power they have because, surprisingly, the whole internet does not have ONE active website about cats. I imagine that the day another website comes up that is good enough to carry interesting traffic, these will lower their hostility or go out of business in seconds.

If I were you, I'd stay away from there. Sites which regularly censor their users make me very uncomfortable.

Keep in mind that many internet forums (especially ones that cater to a crowd of 25 and under are full of people who are rude and nasty on the internet because they can't get away with it in real life. And many mods nitpick and excessively reprimand because they like the authority that they could never have in real life