A good example is https://lemmy.world/c/documentaries
One of their mods, https://lemmy.world/u/sabbah, currently mods 54 communites despite only being on Lemmy for about a month and has never posted on c/documentaries (except for his post asking for people to join his mod team).
The other mod, https://lemmy.world/u/AradFort, has one post to c/documentaries and moderates 18 communities.
Does Lemmy.World have a plan to remove this kind of cancer before we start getting reddit supermods here too?
Edit: This comment shows how this is even more dangerous than I had thought.
Edit2: Official answer from LW admin is here
Final: Was going to create an issue for this on the Lemmy github, but I browsed for awhile and found that it had already been done. If anyone wants to continue the discussion there, here it is - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3452
Perhap we need another issue for the problem in the original edit (It being impossible currently to remove a 'founding' mod without destroying either the community of their account)
Is there a (feasible) way to crowdsource/democratize modding? E.g. having mandated regular elections in place for mods, alternatively for the rules? The latter being better maybe. If rules are voted/agreed on and then either the admins or some external, neutral ,(non community/"subreddit"-level) instance jury/court could handle complaints where the users feel that a mod has not acted appropriately/implemented the rules decided on
By logical extension, community members could take it in turns to act as a sort of top mod for the week. But all the decisions of that mod would have to be approved in a special biweekly poll post. It could be By a simple majority in the case of purely community-based affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more important changes.
The idea of Fediverse is that you can spin up your own instance and have your own communities.
I appreciate that has a threshold of cost, effort and knowledge to surpass.
But the point is there are many instances, not just the biggest one or two. Maybe consider having your community in one of the others?