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.
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