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.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 years ago

    If the party wants a web site with user comments, it can make one and appoint moderators who can be recalled by party members.

    I am seriously thinking about this now that lemmy supports private instances with closed registrations… if I host an instance for a party I can also control every setting, and encrypt everything… the only way feds could ever see anything is if they get access to a user account. But I’m not sure if the link aggregator format would work well for party organising.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      There’s a sort option for posts called Newest Comment, that essentially turns lemmy into a forum. It allows “necro-bumping” old posts with new comments so that they never die. It’d be very useful for party work or anything ongoing.

    • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      It would be possible to create a Lemmy frontend that looks more like a traditional forum. Hopefully someone will start such a project some day.