Some people might find the answer to be obvious (yes) but I’ve rarely found it so. In fact, this is a question I often find in the linux community (regarding linux going mainstream, not lemmy) and people are pretty split upon it.
On one hand, you may get benefits like more activity, more content, more people to interact with, a greater chance you’ll find someone to talk to on some specific subject.
On the other, you could run into an eternal September like reddit, where Lemmy would lose its culture, and have far more spam and moderation issues.
I don’t know, what do you think?
It would be daunting if Lemmy got a userbase as big as Reddit, with all the problems that come with it.
On a content level however, there should be enough ways to filter out the stuff you don’t wanna see… but even with the possibility to downvote, more moderation would be in order and a clear consensus of where Lemmy wants to position itself and to what degree less popular opinions should be tolerated. This is a thought process that has to be finished before this place gets flooded with an overwhelming wave of new users (which is rather unlikely anyway).
In regards to moderation, some form of democracy should be implemented for each community mod team. Of course, this should be built in a way as to prevent, or at the very least limit, voter fraud and hostile takeovers.
There could be limits set on the protocol level, like only allowing users to vote in elections on their homeserver (or allowing the homeserver admins to choose which servers’ users they’ll allow?). Each community could also vote (or the mods internally vote) on the requirements for voting, like: amount of time subscribed, activity level within the community, age of account, etc.
Perhaps each community could even choose the type of election/voting system. They could be for a set term, until they get voted out, or a constant approval vote where they lose their position if they piss off enough people.
Hell, if you wanted to go even further, an impeachment process could be included. Or maybe every mod action is publically available to be appealed by the community if need be and if enough actions are overturned they lose their position.
I’m really into governance structures, so people might not care for something like this, but I’ve spent some time writing out ideas for a Reddit alternative with heavy emphasis on governance, both community and site wide. Mainly for the purposes of preventing authoritarian behavior by mods and site admins alike. It’d be pretty cool to see Lemmy adopt things like this.
I would say that Lemmy already has a kind of democracy built in, which is that users can pick an instance based on their preferences, and also relatively easily change instances. Or use multiple accounts, anonymous or not. Communities can also be moderated from other users. But in the end, the server admin always has total control over the server, that cant be changed. The main influence that users have is the decision which instance they use (and where they create communities).
More advanced tools like the ones you suggest also sound useful, but seems like a lot of work to implement that. Maybe it would make more sense to some type of plugin system for this logic, so that instance admins can choose their preferred way of moderation.