I recently made a feature suggestion post for the Lemmy app Summit, which I personally use.

https://lemmy.world/post/41709672

The idea was a small UI/UX enhancement:

Summit already visually distinguishes roles well:

Community Mods → green

Instance Admins → red

I suggested potentially adding a distinct colour for the Head Mod / Top Mod of a community, for example:

Instance Admin: Red

Head Mod: Yellow

Other Mods: Green

Kind of like a stoplight system (red / yellow / green).

The motivation was to make it easier at a glance to tell who ultimately runs a community, especially in larger mod teams or when reading mod comments in threads.

When I posted this to summit@lemmy.world, idunnololz@lemmy.world (the app’s creator and sole community mod) replied that they don’t think this is currently possible, because there doesn’t appear to be any notion of a “head mod” in the data returned by the API.

So my question for Lemmy devs / maintainers here:

Does Lemmy currently track any concept of a “top mod” or mod hierarchy internally?

If not, is the mod list intentionally flat by design?

Would adding an explicit “community owner” / “head mod” role be technically feasible or aligned with Lemmy’s design philosophy?

Are there federation or governance reasons this hasn’t been modeled?

Not trying to push a specific feature — I’m mostly curious about the architectural and philosophical reasoning behind how moderation roles are represented today.