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'm willing to accept much more compromise than that, for this question.
There are certainly cases where that would be ideal, sure, especially for a local-interest site like running a local organization, but in other broader sites it wouldn't have much utility due to geographical constraints (it would cost thousands of dollars to march up to most website's owners) and may even leave the host open to sabotage/harassment if the location is leaked or becomes public.
If we're in a situation where user access to the metal or legal rights is not ideal (which I think applies to any international forum, or any community unvetted enough to have bad actors present), then it may necessarily forces us into a Benevolent Constitutional Dictatorship situation, I'd assume.
Obviously this has a single point of critical failure: ultimately a single person can just ignore any democratic overlay, unless the userbase is empowered enough to fork and recreate the site when the dictator stops being benevolently subservient. Easier said than done... but I'd debate far from impossible. The FOSS communities could be insightful for real case studies.
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.