A public server is anyone’s world that will take your connection. Java has decades of them. Bedrock has featured servers in the client plus plenty of addresses on the internet. How you join is the multiplayer page. What they are allowed to sell you is bounded by the EULA. What they will ban you for is this page.
Where the rules actually are
Look in three places: the message of the day when you connect, the server’s website, and the Discord or forum linked from spawn. If those three disagree, the strictest one is the one staff will quote. A sign at spawn that says “read /rules” is the tutorial. Type it.
Clauses you will see almost everywhere
- No hacked clients: no kill aura, no x-ray, no freecam, no inventory mods that show chest contents through walls.
- No advertising another server, in chat or with a book in a chest.
- One account per person. Ban evasion with an alt is a second ban, not a fresh start.
- No NSFW builds, and often no real-world political builds. Staff do not want to moderate either.
- Respect claims and regions. “I didn’t know” lasts until the first time you walk past a border that pushed you back.
Anarchy and hardcore servers advertise the opposite: fewer protections, raiding allowed, sometimes cheating allowed. That is still a rule. “Anything goes” that was never written down is how you lose gear and then learn the server was not, in fact, anarchy.
Bans and appeals
Punishments are usually a mute, a temporary ban, or a permanent one. Appeals go through the ticket channel or the forum the rules named. They do not go through shouting at a moderator in global chat at 2am, and they do not go through making a new account. A useful appeal says what happened, links a clip if you have one, and does not call the staff names. You will not win an appeal by explaining that the other player deserved it.
The everyday version of these rules, for worlds that are not public, is player etiquette. Finding communities that are worth the rules is fan clubs.