upvotes are way too easy too manipulate on fedi so if you really want democratic elections you would need a better system. but lets just keep it simple

mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.

I don’t think this is a good idea. I’d encourage you to look at my comment history in this community specifically. Every comment I’ve left in my official capacity is a direct result of at least one user report. I prefer a very light touch moderation style, where I address rule breaking content when reported but otherwise let the community manage itself.

Those comments I left are not terribly popular, and I think that’s the heart of the problem. Running a community effectively and maintaining some sense of order is not generally a very popular activity. Do we really want to make moderation a popularity contest? Beyond that, I don’t post much in fediverse, does that mean I’m ill suited to being a mod here? I don’t think so.

I agree in general that poor moderation can be a problem, but letting the most popular posters run the community doesn’t seem like the fix.

Literally nothing is stopping you from creating communities or even an entire instance that follows that principle…

If you want to do it, then do it.

And if people want it, they’ll participate.

But even if they do, I don’t think you’ll get the result you expect and want

So your probelm with the platforms is not the platforms themselves, but people? Because the mods running communities here aren’t too different from the refit communities.

As for your second point, you want karma farmers to run the communities?

IMHO, most Lemmy mods are fine. And it doesn’t take years to advertise your community. The end.

Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.

wow, that may be the worst idea for the direction of lemmy since the Tesseract guy. bravo

But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen

It literally takes as few as 2 people to have a meaningful discussion, so the idea it needs to be some kind of massively large site is already a false premise.

Discussing the solution would be to accept the premise. And the premise I think is flawed, pun intended, so let’s adress it first.

Majority of instances are extremely small, so if you are correct on the surface analysis that most fail, it may simply be people giving up on their venture for going to a place more stable and that they don’t have to manage themselves.

Also surface analysis is another problem by itself because the premises for it can be faulty, and saying as if it’s a certainty can help spread misconceptions. And there’s also the problem of the sensationalistic tone.

And on communities failing, define failing, please. Some may indeed, but what if they simply represent a topic so niche it rarely warrants discussions?

And on migrating, if the very top is problematic, voting out can be hard too. Even more so if it’s the guy paying the bills or managing the infraestructure. And also example comes from the above, as the saying goes, so users cather to the culture they want to see fostered by the administration.

Furthermore, still on voting, who’s to say, if voting is implemented, bot and paid actor accounts aren’t made discretely over time to rig them?

Also, what works to one group may not work to another, or even to the same group in different periods.

And still on migrating overall, since here’s a network, not simply just a bunch of social medias aware of one another, if you make an account on a new platform, there’s a kickstart of potential users since they’re still in the network.

And regarding the network aspect, using a software with microblogging integration such as Mbin, Piefed, Catodon or Friendica can give an even further push, since then you can use hashtags, boosts, following besides subscribing, community packs, etc.

Also on being a network, you can use relays, such as Threadirator and the other project with a same purpose I always forget the name. That helps making it appear on the connected instances.

And with the problems I could notice out of the way, no onto the proposed solution alternative:

The fediverse is a network, so you are free to make an instance to try that yourself. Or also to approach instance administrators to see if they’d be willing to experiment, since people can be rather approachable if you ask them directly.

And if the idea works out, similar to how historically it goes, people will copy the model. But a beautiful idea on paper means nothing without concrete examples. And as it’s presented, it sounds more like a liability than a proper model.

We tried this in !simdemocracy@lemmy.world and the community’s completely dead so…

Thank you for sharing.

I disagree with the problem hence with the solution. Because Lemmy isn’t centralised the bigger instances are more into a oligopoly situation that in a monopoly. Therefore it is not easy but definitly doable to move a community from one instance to the other to free our selves from the mods. Of course, we cannt be sure without an example. If anyone think of some case, I’m listening.

You also seems to simply the way moderation acts. Moderation happened at the instance level and the community level and not only is the rule inforces by a different team (or single overworked moderator) when you switch community or instances but the set of rule is different.

I don’t even like leaning to heavily on moderation. I want emphasis to be on users ability to curate their feed.

There is no need for elections, cause you can just choose whichever admin or mods you want. It’s not a democracy, you just choose what you like best and everyone has the same choice. That’s better than democracy cause nobody has to compromise.

If you think mods or admins are doing a bad job, choose different mods or admins or become your own admin.

Obviously being a corporation means they’re terrible no matter what. […] Even if Reddit was 100% community owned

It would still be a corporation. Do you realise unions, non-profit NGOs, churches, and every legal entity that isn’t a literal human, is a corporation?

toxic mods ruined Reddit

No they didn’t. At most they ruined their community. But anyone can make another community on Reddit. Doubly so here on Lemmy.

That will just make sure that it will be impossible to create niche communities about unpopular ideas, if (the same) majorities can decide mods everywhere. To take an analogy from the offline world: democracy is a very good and necessary thing for running a government because there can be only one government in a specific territory. But corporations are not (normally) run democratically, instead we allow different ones to compete and people to be customers or employees at whichever of them does things best. Lemmy communities are like corporations, not like governments: there can be more than one of them and we can individually choose which ones to be parts of.

The status quo is roughly fine in this regard. We’ve had the concept of moderators being appointed from above since I started to be on the Internet at all (more than 20 years ago), back then it was on a lot of independent forums.

Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.

FUCK NO!

Votes are never an indicator of quality.