My naive hope is that a mailing list with 10 strangers will not devolve into utter chaos immediately. It might fade into irrelevance, sure, but that is just how entropy works.
Of course. If you're the BOFH of the whole thing, you don't even need to get anyone else's approval.
But if you do want the community to weigh in on who's "stupid" and who's not, then suddenly you might discover that three out of your ten members actually think that the person in question is a genius and is holding the whole thing together. Four members might think that booting anyone out at all runs counter to the purpose of your mailing list. Two people will privately email you and the "stupid" person, trying to somehow play both sides for no reason you can comprehend. One person will say that if anyone gets kicked out, they'll leave two.
And all those numbers may overlap!
Moderation is hard.
Moderation is easy. Moderating without hurting the feelings of anonymous strangers is hard.
Then your life becomes easy, because your mailing list becomes empty.
feel free to ping me if you want more technical tips, or if you want to use my mailman instance instead of trying to shave that particular hairy yak.