The way it should work is that people who routinely contribute in a way the user-base appreciates will be trusted to make decisions that, if not undone by the admin who guides the culture of the site, will snowball into more trust and power. It's dependent on the community sharing an approach to how to contribute, enforced by the vision of the founder.
The biggest thing with Tildes is that it seems intentionally designed not to scale. That's actually very cool, in its way, but the main instance is not and never will be suitable to be a replacement for mass numbers of Reddit refugees.