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.
There is one system that could prevent mod abuse of communities and it would actually work, I think, but it's not easy to implement with federation. Every user chooses their own mod of a community to "subscribe" to their moderation work. So, essentially, anybody could apply to become a mod, and do moderation work, but the only people that would see their moderation work would be the people that have "subscribed" to it. No need to move an entire community, just pick yourself a different mod.
This is of course, difficult to implement, particularly with federation, and the devs are already aware of the idea (it's in the github issue linked by Dessalines).
Definitely hard to implement, but an idea I've never heard of before. Thanks for bringing this up. Cool to think about. Does any other site actually use this moderation technique?
I've never used it, but Aether uses something like this + mod voting on top of it.
https://getaether.net/docs/
https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/
On a larger scale, stack overflow has moderator elections: https://stackoverflow.com/election/13
I like this! I think, like you say, it's not easy to do, and I think federating/de-federating or subscribing/unsubscribing is an imperfect proxy to your suggestion. What does suck, though is when a community becomes "too big" and, due to a large audience base the cost of mass migration is substantial.
I think of the drift of a place like /r/IAMA - which used to have the slogan " I Am A, where the mundane becomes fascinating and the outrageous suddenly seems normal." It was more about the anything part than anything else.
But it has sense become a promotion platform for celebrities, having almost entirely left behind its original identity.
Or the drift into racist co-opting of half of the joke subreddits. But in those cases they transform and it's hard to solve by snipping out the mods.
I thought I was gonna end with a clear takeaway here, but I guess not really. Maybe it's this: insofar as you can stop it by sniping out bad actor mods, there's a positive there, especially if it can be done without open voting which can be dominated by angry mobs.