It would be nice, I think, if there were more ways for the members of a community and instances to interact democratically with the rules and moderation.
I.E. Mod elections, being able to put users bans up for vote, vote on sidebar changes, vote on feature selections, vote on when or if to stop accepting new users, etc, etc.
Basically anything a mod or site admin does being up for democratic vote, even if it doesn’t generally need to be extended to all the users (because of possible brigrading or fake users).
Seems like a solution looking for a problem. Besides having the ability to create (or ban) an infinite number of accounts to rig a vote, instances have an incentive to keep the quality of content high.
If an admin wants to put something to a vote, they can, but even with a vote you can’t force an admin to do what the community wants.
I think a lot of the potential problems this could solve can be better solved in other ways, i.e. account migrating to let people bail on an instance they don’t like.
Having to migrate should be a last resort for a user, not the go to. It assumes that there are instances that support their wishes existing somewhere with the federation to other instances they may enjoy. It seems far simpler, from a users’ perspective, to allow them to have a voice in decisions they care about for their communities.
Abusive or uninvolved mods and admins, is an old hat problem at this point, this could help mitigate that. Obviously admin power will always be an issue, so long as they are the ones with hands on access and power of the underlying systems, so this isn’t trying to solve that, just provide a better way to manage an instance that helps align its policies with certain users better (again some for of selection of users is needed just because of the alt accounts issue).