I believe he isn’t scared of anyone who uses Onion Farms, but I believe he finds this site disconcerting.
This is because the splinter sites in general, here, Lolcow.farm, Lolcow.org, tend to have a weird pattern of finding or locating things that no one knew about. Such as doxes on Jannies, lore no one else knew or even info on Josh himself.
The explanation for this isn’t very hard to understand. Josh won’t let people discuss this type of information on his site, and this is kind of understandable even if hypocritical. Nearly every online community needs a leader, and if that leader and his “crew” are being constantly dunked on, exposed or scrutinised, that leader will inevitably be dog-piled by his own community rendering it dysfunctional.
That being said, I believe that a lot of the people Josh bans are “go against the system” types. A lot of the banned people, if you notice, are usually observant, obsessive and willing to break the rules. These character traits make these people the most likely to be the ones to actually gather or obtain sensitive information, which is probably the only thing that concerns Josh or his staff.
Yes, a lot of the banned people are retarded, coomers or criminals, but you’ll notice that the few that relocate to splinters tend to be a lot more curious and questioning. This is what I believe scares Josh rather than any site or person in particular.
The way to fix this would be if Josh were to debunk things people are curious about, or answer the unanswered questions people have, it could risk users being angry or mocking of him momentarily, but it’s probably a better long term solution than what he’s doing right now.
The issue with banning people who go against him personally, his values or his staff, is that he risks appearing like a tyranny. There is a balance and finding it could solve this issue.