Looks like r/antiwork mods made the subreddit private in response to this post
This fiasco highlights that such forums are vulnerable to the whims of a few individuals, and if those individuals can be subverted than the entire community can be destroyed. Reddit communities are effectively dictatorships where the mods cannot be held to account, recalled, or dismissed, even when community at large disagrees with them.
This led me to think that Lemmy is currently vulnerable to the same problem. I'm wondering if it would make sense to brainstorm some ideas to address this vulnerability in the future.
One idea could be to have an option to provide members of a community with the ability to hold elections or initiate recalls. This could be implemented as a special type post that allows community to vote, and if a sufficient portion of the community participates then a mod could be elected or recalled.
This could be an opt in feature that would be toggled when the community is created, and would be outside the control of the mods from that point on.
Maybe it's a dumb idea, but I figured it might be worth having a discussion on.
I see what happened as a flaw in anarchism itself that reminded me of the essay Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman:
r/antiwork users saw it as not just a place to chat but a movement, though a structureless one. It turns out that there was structure all along, dictated not by the users but the corporation, enabling whoever created the subreddit to ban users, censor speech, and act as spokesperson.
The solution is to have an actual IRL party with a formal structure and democratic centralism. If the party wants a web site with user comments, it can make one and appoint moderators who can be recalled by party members. The key is that a real movement must be led by a party, not a structureless crowd on a web site.
The problem is there's no IRL party. The "community" is whoever posts here. If lemmy ever takes off, what's to keep cops, marketers, right-wing trolls, etc. from voting in the election?
Excellent points! There are inherent limits to what can be achieved using online spaces, and any serious movement should organize offline first and foremost. That said, I do think that online spaces play an important role, particularly when it comes to agitation. Western left is just starting to discover ideas like class consciousness, and a lot of people get exposure to these ideas on internet forums such as Reddit and Lemmy. Then they talk to their families, friends, coworkers, and other people they interact with in physical spaces. We need a ways to promote communism with people who have no ideological training and who are looking to make sense of the changing world. This is why I think we need good forums for doing agitation and education. As you note, having an existing IRL organization run something like a Lemmy instance might be a good way to achieve that.
I am seriously thinking about this now that lemmy supports private instances with closed registrations... if I host an instance for a party I can also control every setting, and encrypt everything... the only way feds could ever see anything is if they get access to a user account. But I'm not sure if the link aggregator format would work well for party organising.
There's a sort option for posts called
Newest Comment, that essentially turns lemmy into a forum. It allows "necro-bumping" old posts with new comments so that they never die. It'd be very useful for party work or anything ongoing.It would be possible to create a Lemmy frontend that looks more like a traditional forum. Hopefully someone will start such a project some day.