this whole reddit situation has me thinking about how large internet communities can work without running the risk of a centralized actor taking it out. And I'm coming up blank, honestly. The whole federated collection of servers with communities on them like kbin/lemmy reduces impact of any one server / admin going rogue, which is perhaps the best compromise so far. Plebbit with its completely decentralized torrent like system is promising, but probably not accessible enough to grow very large, and it still has the centralized moderators that all other communities have.
Then I was thinking, perhaps the very role of moderator should be decentralized, with your posts being judged by a jury of your (perhaps literal) peers. I just don't see a way of that working out though, unless we start with the assumption that most users are going to be truthful in their judgements and not going to abuse the system. Without that assumption, you'll have to judge the judges, so the chain of events would be like
a user posts something
another user reports it as "scam"
a group of different users get the question "is that a scam"
everyone gets their reputation modified according to whether that report was justified and if their judgement of it was correct
for any of that to work at all, there needs to be some sort of reputation system, a critical mass of users that cares about their reputation and a way to randomly elect people from that group to act as a jury (for every single report?). And then of course it should be combined with that plebbit like decentralization for it to be worth it at all. Without a solid
I'm just musing a bit here but it seems like completely removing central points of failure from a large global online community is impossible without also killing the accessibility that would allow it to grow into a large community in the first place. Central community leaders / moderators do so much work, work that would probably drive a casual visitor away if they were asked to do even a small part of it. Sure, an upvote / downvote here and there isn't bad, but if your scrolling experience gets interrupted by a picture of dismembered bodies with the question "is this post gore?" then I wouldn't blame you for putting the phone down permanently.