I’m splitting this into two parts. First identifying the issue. And second my personal idea for a solution. I’m hoping for a lot of discussion so please be clear which part you are responding to.
Part 1: The problem
Reddit as a platform has many flaws. Obviously being a corporation means they’re terrible no matter what. But their platform is also flawed. Even if Reddit was 100% community owned the platform would still be flawed. The number one thing that is ruining Reddit are the tyrannical mods.
Each community on Reddit is a dictatorship. Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want. The people who are actually creating the content and sharing it are totally at their whim. I understand that modding is a difficult and thankless job, but toxic mods ruined Reddit and Lemmy will do the same if it’s not addressed.
Lemmy’s answer is to allow people to create their own instances. Don’t like the mods at World? Go make your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers. But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen, and nearly all communities or instances fail. We absolutely need a way for mods to answer to the users.
Part 2: My solution
My solution is simple. Lemmy is built on the community. Everyone helps run it. Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
Elections should happen on a schedule and, if a community is particularly upset with a mod, a vote of no confidence can be taken.
I understand that this will be a huge undertaking. But I truly believe that we need to fix this issue for Lemmy to thrive long term. Or else we’ll just end up with another Reddit.
What a misunderstanding of the nature of the Fediverse and how federation works. The point of federation is more to a connected social network while distributing infrastructure across volunteers.
I will have to be pedantic and note that r/Anarchism on Reddit does elect moderators, but not based on the criteria you suggest. In fact, it’s quite problematic as the skills of linking cool things/writing good posts and managing people like you would as a moderator are quite different skills! While I’ve never ran a Lemmy community or a subreddit, I did run a Discord server once as well as a traditional forum, and the social aspect was far harder than the technical aspect, and I did not know Discord as a platform at all when I did that. The community was a trainwreck as a result.
That being said, a democratically-run instance isn’t a bad idea. I agree with givesomefucks on lemmy.world in that the best way to go about this is to have an instance with that kind of rule set. In fact, there are Mastodon instances that are cooperatives like social.coop and cosocial.ca that could be looked at for inspiration for a Lemmy cooperative, which is what it sounds like you’re looking for to some extent. I think in practice it’d probably look like a very scaled down version of Usenet’s Big 8 Board.