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.
Glad to see you've already be thinking about it, and those are all excellent points. It is hard to make a system like that in a way that precludes it from being gamed, and voting would require tracking user reputation in some way as well. I imagine it's something that would need to be tried and refined over time if you do decide to give it a shot. No matter how good the system is, people will continue to look for different ways to game it. So, it's always going to be an arms race between loopholes being discovered and addressed.
I also very much agree with the emphasis on active users over subscriber counts. Ultimately, it's the people who actually participate that make the community what it is. Although, jumping communities/servers might be a bit trickier once the scale grows. And this would be an important aspect from activism perspective. If there were a million active users in a community, and it was being used for real world agitation and organizing, then a rogue mod could potentially do a lot of damage.
Thinking a bit more about it, I wonder if a simpler solution than voting could be to allow making communities with restricted mod powers instead. For example, could make it so that community can't be deleted, mods can't take it private, etc. And as you note, if the admins are actively participating then they can be used as arbiters for issues like rogue mods. You're right that this is a big difference from Reddit, and if server admins go rogue then there's really nothing you can do about that with software anyways. So some trust is ultimately necessary.
I just wanted to float the idea, and I'm also not sure how workable it would be in practice. It's obviously a bunch of effort to implement and test a feature like this, so it's worth thinking about the merits before investing the time into implementing it.
I think your suggestion provides some good balance, you're right in that, even in a decentralized platform, there has to be some local trust/centralization. I find trusting the server admins easier than the community mods, so shifting some of their powers could be good. Additionally, if migration tools are to be developed, a community could fairly easily move itself to another instance, in case the trust on the admins cracks.
Right, since there has to be trust in admins of an instance it might make more sense to move more power to the admins, with federation being a fallback if the admins go rogue.
100% agree. Especially since communities really do "live" on a server. Another server can have a backup of that community's history (IE federated content they see on their own server), but if the original server dies, then so does the that community... and it would have to be re-created.
Fortunately besides deleting all your own content, even mods cannot edit or actually database delete anything but their own content. Even a community delete is just a boolean flag, and communities can be undeleted with no harm done.
But yes there's so much with democratic moderation that has never been tested or implemented, that its completely unpredictable. I'm not sure I would want lemmy to be a test-case for that potential instability, I'd rather have other projects figure out something that works first.
Completely agree with all that. I don't think this is an urgent concern and, as you note, there aren't really good examples of the idea having been implemented. It's something to keep an eye on, but likely not worth trying to pioneer.