[Update] AtomicPoet has deleted the piefed.social communities where he was the sole moderator (!movies@piefed.social being the exception). Content is still available, details in the linked post
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It's not software that represents the people, it's the people using the software that represent the people.
If you handpick people vs if you run a defederated instance seems about the same approach, just at a different level.
If the granularity of like-mindedness standard gets too narrow you do just end up an increasingly homogenous group.
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That's why I mentioned Trump & you provided the Truth Social mention (it's def not a personal level comparison) and how homogeneous it looks to the average outsider. But that does fit the description, only for such a community 'one can take responsibility', bcs it's 'his', not just the sever, but in a sense what the community is/the people are & what they do (same with CEOs in a company).
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To very much exaggerate: like a cult agreeing on everything except the small things like what to have for dinner.
All the issues you repeated here seem like they are normal for a group of more than one person.
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It's just how humans are built. And how communities naturally evolve, live & change.
You mentioned the 'freedom of association' - do you kinda equate that (association) with allegiance? Like a selected badge one wears?
The problem with your framing is that it treats software as neutral when it isn’t.
Social media software encodes structure into how communities are organized. If the software is hierarchical, the community will be hierarchical. There’s no way around that unless everyone literally operates their own nodes.
And that’s where the real vulnerability lies. If you don’t run your own server, you’re not sovereign. You’re donating your content to someone else’s machine and trusting that their standards, moderation, and moods won’t turn against you. Ideals won’t protect you if the design itself makes you dependent.
If you really care about a sense of ownership, then you should be running your own server. That’s what freedom of association actually means. It isn’t allegiance. Allegiance locks you in. Association multiplies your choices—pick a server that matches your values, or start your own. That’s the entire point of federation.
So let’s not pretend mass platforms or wide-open instances are some higher form of democracy. They aren’t. They’re just populism sitting on top of hierarchy. The lowest common denominator gets to shout “this is the people,” while the actual levers of control stay exactly where they’ve always been—with whoever holds the keys.
On your instance too others are contributing the content, not you as a mod. Humans regardless of hierarchical or anarchical systems are the community. It's the gathering & exchanging. It's not the king paying for a feast that makes the guests mingle & communicate with each other. That's just infrastructure. If they go away to anther party there is no content there, unless the kind posts for themselves.
But are you saying that owning the server makes you own whoever donates their content in a discussion just bcs they have a systemic power?
I don't think people are generally confused at all how hierarchical online platforms are. Why would they be?
The feast metaphor doesn’t hold. If I pay for a banquet hall, the guests can mingle—but they don’t control the locks on the doors, the electricity, or whether the venue even stays open tomorrow. If I decide to shut the place down, the party ends whether they like it or not. That’s not neutral infrastructure. That’s systemic power.
I’m not saying the admin “owns” people’s words. Users own what they write. But whether that writing continues to exist, whether it stays visible, whether it can even be reached—those are all contingent on the admin. Content lives inside infrastructure, and whoever holds the keys controls the environment where it persists.
And people absolutely are confused about this. Look at lemm.ee: did the community want to vanish overnight? No—but the admin pulled the plug, and everything disappeared. The same happens on Reddit when admins close subreddits, or on Discord when a server gets nuked. People routinely find themselves blindsided because they mistake participation for ownership.
That’s the point I’m pressing: software that demands admins and mods creates hierarchy, no matter what ideals we wrap around it. If we want a true commons, the architecture has to change—there can’t be “users,” only peers, each running their own node. Until then, pretending otherwise is just comforting metaphor.
That is systemic power to end it, not to have content created. For that is just a space.
I'm not sure who was arguing against there being a hierarchy to online or most offline social communities.
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You don't have a town square if nobody builds it, you have the woods.
Also what is the big deal if a community gets obliterated from time to time? It's not a family.
Space isn’t “just a space.” Space is what makes words accessible. A post that nobody can reach might as well not exist. Infrastructure isn’t neutral—it’s the condition that makes communication possible in the first place.
And admins don’t just have the power to end a space. They have the power to prevent speech from ever happening. They can de-platform, silence, or exclude before words are written. That’s not trivial. That’s systemic control over what gets created, not just what gets erased.
And sometimes communities really are families—both literal and ad hoc. People pour years of energy, conversation, and memory into them. When they get obliterated, it’s not “just a space” disappearing—it’s a shared history wiped out because one person with keys decided it was over.
What makes your comment even more striking is that it contradicts your earlier points. First you downplayed hierarchy by saying admins are just neutral facilitators, now you admit they hold systemic power but dismiss it as “no big deal.” Which one is it?
That’s the imbalance I’m pointing at. If we want real commons, that has to change. Otherwise we’re all just tenants, and the landlord can decide at any moment to bulldoze the building. Dismissing that as unimportant is exactly how these power structures stay invisible.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I'm saying the same thing all a long.
Fair enough—I probably came in sharper than I needed to. I get that you’re not denying the power imbalance, just framing it differently.
We’re closer in view than it might have sounded. My aim wasn’t to dunk on you, just to stress that these structures aren’t neutral. If we’re both pointing in the same direction, then good—that’s where the real work begins.
Yes, kinda.
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But as authoritarian as mods are, that also means their behaviour is more on display (I mean that regardless of rule choices, just as basically branding, which I frame under infrastructure too - tho some mods post a lot).
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Much like (in normal countries) judges can lose their jobs due to private life & examples they set (it's a full-time representation, not just the hours in a robe).
You’re framing visibility as if it’s accountability.
But mods aren’t accountable to users—they’re accountable to admins. If a mod aligns with an admin, users can scream all they want, nothing changes. If a mod sides with the community but not the admin, the admin overrules both. That’s hierarchy, full stop.
Let’s be real. The whole conceit of YPTB is a farce. You’re not “holding mods accountable.” You’re doing populism dressed up as anarchism, aligning with admin tastes when it suits.
Out of all the possible people in the community, it just so happens that the true authorities—the ones setting the norms and nurturing the culture—are the same ones holding the keys to the entire server. And those are the very people wielding YPTB as a cudgel in the name of “accountability.” That’s not accountability. That’s a closed loop.
If lemmy.dbzer0.com were serious about anarchism, the admins would say: “No mods, no users, no hierarchy—everyone go operate their own nodes.” But they don’t. Instead, this community exists under the admin’s keys, which feeds an illusion.
And that “visibility” you’re pointing to? It’s not accountability—it’s branding. Admin branding. It only exists because lemmy.dbzer0.com allows it to exist, and only as long as the server remains federated. Flip that switch and your visibility, your supposed accountability, evaporates overnight.
I'm sorry, but it really feels like we are increasingly not in the same conversation anymore.