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 think yes and no to this. Yes because Lemmy as it currently exists kind of has the same thing going on. People who create the communities are the creators and that's that.
But no, because federating is supposed to be a mitigation here. I know that mastodon.social and pixelfed have sometimes shut down signups to purposely spread the userbase across other servers, and perhaps some rebalancing across credible servers can help here.
That would be my first idea.
I think I would veer away from elections because that could have unintended cultural effects. They could be gamed, create inward looking drama that makes no sense to people on the outside, etc.
I like the brainstorming here though, and I agree that your suggestion would help avoid that problem, but its at the cost I think of bringing on some unintended consequences. If we can lean into existing features that would be my option A.
That's been my thinking as well, there isn't a clear and simple solution to the problem. So, it's interesting to do some brainstorming to see what can be done to address these kinds of things.