The feast metaphor doesnāt hold. If I pay for a banquet hall, the guests can mingleābut they donāt 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. Thatās not neutral infrastructure. Thatās systemic power.
Iām not saying the admin āownsā peopleās words. Users own what they write. But whether that writing continues to exist, whether it stays visible, whether it can even be reachedāthose 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? Noābut 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.
Thatās the point Iām 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 changeāthere canāt be āusers,ā 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.
Iām not sure who was arguing against there being a hierarchy to online or most offline social communities.
You donāt 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? Itās not a family.
Space isnāt ājust a space.ā Space is what makes words accessible. A post that nobody can reach might as well not exist. Infrastructure isnāt neutralāitās the condition that makes communication possible in the first place.
And admins donāt 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. Thatās not trivial. Thatās systemic control over what gets created, not just what gets erased.
And sometimes communities really are familiesāboth literal and ad hoc. People pour years of energy, conversation, and memory into them. When they get obliterated, itās not ājust a spaceā disappearingāitās 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 āno big deal.ā Which one is it?
Thatās the imbalance Iām pointing at. If we want real commons, that has to change. Otherwise weāre 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.
Fair enoughāI probably came in sharper than I needed to. I get that youāre not denying the power imbalance, just framing it differently.
Weāre closer in view than it might have sounded. My aim wasnāt to dunk on you, just to stress that these structures arenāt neutral. If weāre both pointing in the same direction, then goodāthatās where the real work begins.
Yes, kinda.
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).
Much like (in normal countries) judges can lose their jobs due to private life & examples they set (itās a full-time representation, not just the hours in a robe).
Youāre framing visibility as if itās accountability.
But mods arenāt accountable to usersātheyāre 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. Thatās hierarchy, full stop.
Letās be real. The whole conceit of YPTB is a farce. Youāre not āholding mods accountable.ā Youāre 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 authoritiesāthe ones setting the norms and nurturing the cultureāare 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 āaccountability.ā Thatās not accountability. Thatās a closed loop.
If lemmy.dbzer0.com were serious about anarchism, the admins would say: āNo mods, no users, no hierarchyāeveryone go operate their own nodes.ā But they donāt. Instead, this community exists under the adminās keys, which feeds an illusion.
And that āvisibilityā youāre pointing to? Itās not accountabilityāitās 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.
![[Update] AtomicPoet has deleted the piefed.social communities where he was the sole moderator ([email protected] being the exception). Content is still available, details in the linked post](https://lazysoci.al/pictrs/image/cb7c5a29-e297-41a8-bde5-698ba205c3fd.png){kind=link}
The feast metaphor doesnāt hold. If I pay for a banquet hall, the guests can mingleābut they donāt 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. Thatās not neutral infrastructure. Thatās systemic power.
Iām not saying the admin āownsā peopleās words. Users own what they write. But whether that writing continues to exist, whether it stays visible, whether it can even be reachedāthose 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? Noābut 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.
Thatās the point Iām 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 changeāthere canāt be āusers,ā 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.
Iām not sure who was arguing against there being a hierarchy to online or most offline social communities.
You donāt 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? Itās not a family.
Space isnāt ājust a space.ā Space is what makes words accessible. A post that nobody can reach might as well not exist. Infrastructure isnāt neutralāitās the condition that makes communication possible in the first place.
And admins donāt 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. Thatās not trivial. Thatās systemic control over what gets created, not just what gets erased.
And sometimes communities really are familiesāboth literal and ad hoc. People pour years of energy, conversation, and memory into them. When they get obliterated, itās not ājust a spaceā disappearingāitās 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 āno big deal.ā Which one is it?
Thatās the imbalance Iām pointing at. If we want real commons, that has to change. Otherwise weāre 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 wasnāt clear, but Iām saying the same thing all a long.
Fair enoughāI probably came in sharper than I needed to. I get that youāre not denying the power imbalance, just framing it differently.
Weāre closer in view than it might have sounded. My aim wasnāt to dunk on you, just to stress that these structures arenāt neutral. If weāre both pointing in the same direction, then goodāthatās where the real work begins.
Yes, kinda.
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).
Much like (in normal countries) judges can lose their jobs due to private life & examples they set (itās a full-time representation, not just the hours in a robe).
Youāre framing visibility as if itās accountability.
But mods arenāt accountable to usersātheyāre 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. Thatās hierarchy, full stop.
Letās be real. The whole conceit of YPTB is a farce. Youāre not āholding mods accountable.ā Youāre 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 authoritiesāthe ones setting the norms and nurturing the cultureāare 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 āaccountability.ā Thatās not accountability. Thatās a closed loop.
If lemmy.dbzer0.com were serious about anarchism, the admins would say: āNo mods, no users, no hierarchyāeveryone go operate their own nodes.ā But they donāt. Instead, this community exists under the adminās keys, which feeds an illusion.
And that āvisibilityā youāre pointing to? Itās not accountabilityāitās 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.
Iām sorry, but it really feels like we are increasingly not in the same conversation anymore.