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 are robust ways to do that. I've had discussions about it on Lemmy, so I could find the technical term again if necessary. The idea is to have everyone vote at the same time, and pass a turing test (for example a captcha) during a particular timeframe.
But I had thought of a different possible solution for lemmy. There could be a top-level namespace shared by all instances. So there is only one global "antiwork" community. There can in fact be many with the same name but when you search for c/antiwork you will be redirected to whichever one has the most active users / month. Other communities with the same name can still be found through their URLs. But if there is a mass exodus from the global community to a different one, the new one will automatically take its place in the global namespace.
For the other problem of mods deleting things, tags will help. So you could have a setup where nothing can ever be deleted, only tagged as "deleted". Users have to turn on "deleted" in their filter and all the posts which were purged will become visible, along with all the deleted spam posts.