I've been intrigued by the apparent dichotomy between a very hierarchical internet from a technology POV, and the democratic ideals of both socialists and liberals. I'm sure we've all experience or been aware of mod/admin abuse on forums, groups, subreddits and all that, even maybe in thematically socialist groups. We've also seen sane-washing (see /r/antiwork, created by literal 'abolish work' anarchists, become a lib-to-soc pipeline at best).
So, I'd like to know more about communities which have tried to allow users, or a subset of users, to democratically hold power over staff. I'm interested on how they went, which have been a success, and what caused others to fail.
I've been thinking about this for a while and basically agree except that my conclusion is websites necessarily should be hosted and organized locally in order to preserve the power of the users. Since not every topic of discussion is something that makes sense to conduct on a local basis the solution in my eyes is federation of locally operated websites. It is not a coincidence that this conceptually maps pretty closely to a vision of locally governed communes in a federation. The goal isn't just to solve the hierarchical tech bro problem but also to act as pre-figurative parallel to the action we need to organize our real world communities.