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.
IMO any such changes towards democratization would probably be best suited to a different Fediverse project entirely given how much it alters the structure of the genre of site Lemmy falls under.
I think the real lesson from the whole fiasco is that people shouldn’t place more political expectations on a subreddit than its capable of handling. Reddit/Lemmy has specific uses it’s good for, and things it’s not good at. Upvotes, subcommunities, and central moderation all contribute to the problems with Reddit but at the same time they stay because they’ve proven to be the most effective at doing what Reddit is built to do. Yet the unfortunate thing is that a lot of movements have begun using Reddit in ways it wasn’t meant to be used.
When it comes to making a sort of rallying point for things like what /r/antiwork was going after, IMO the whole structure of the site would have to be re-thought. And while I think we should begin with experimenting with platform design more, I don’t think it’s a good idea to burden platforms which were designed to act as direct alternatives to mainstream platforms with unnecessary features which may or may not work out.
So IMO, it’s better to work on theorycrafting an entirely separate ActivityPub project which isn’t constrained by Reddit-like design and can directly address the issues /r/antiwork was inherently facing from even before this interview.
I agree that a whole new project that’s explicitly designed for organization would likely achieve the best results. I do think it makes sense to keep UX largely the same since it’s been shown to scale well, but the underlying mechanics would need to be rethought.
One point that’s been brought up here a few times is that server admins ultimately have full control of the server, and can even just shut it down. So, a more decentralized architecture would be needed from ground up to prevent this.
The main problem that I think needs to be solved is how to prevent bad actors from ruining a community. This includes external problems like brigading, as well as internal ones such as rogue mods or admins. It has to be assumed that good actors can flip, and there needs to be some process for removing them from power at that point.