I participate in a lot of real world communities that are more horizontally organized and many do have a similar dynamic, but a key difference is that there are many levels of involvement and the more involved you become, the more influence you have.
Thing is, on the fediverse, one should not confuse involvement with the act of using it. Involvement means participating in communities moderation and running servers. If mods of a 100 users community come to slrpnk.net saying “you know, hexbears users have been really helpful in setting up the /c/solarpunkbigepicstoryline” they will have a saying. But a random user that may be a bot or the alt of a banned troll is certainly not going to get the same weight.
In theory we could vote, but there is a technical impossibility: organizing reliable anonymous votes online is simply not possible.
Mods have a bit of authority but rarely have any process for weighing the views of individual users
Indeed, they have more of an editor power: they make editorial decisions, subjectively listen to feedbacks and see how their communities evolve.
The difference between these is pretty large in terms of skill and time required, and it’s quite difficult to move between them.
In terms of skills, a mod is a regular user, that’s it. And time requirements can vary, but being part of a decently sized mod team is not a huge time commitment. Thing is, I feel it fair to say that people willing to put extra effort in community managements should not necessarily feel forced to take into account the decisions of everyone not willing to do it.
I mean, if I offer a free service because I believe in volunteer work and gift economy, and users vote to complain that it lacks a feature that would double my amount of work (like federation with known toxic communities), I think it is fair for me to deny it.
If I were offering a paid service and getting a wage from it, the dynamics would be different. We are too used to corporate systems where the crucial resource is money, and paid users satisfaction is the most important. In FOSS, the crucial ressource is devs/volunteers motivation, and anything that increases it is what you want to maximize.
(disclaimer: it is a hypothetical, I am not running any lemmy instance)
Ceci. Faut pas promouvoir le libre échange pendant un siècle pour venir se plaindre que des joueurs émergents s’en sortent mieux que nous!