It’s theirs. They can do whatever they want. Any limits their power within the instance/community is purely voluntary on the part of the owner.

Mods and admins on the Fediverse are not democratically elected, they have complete control. Accusing one of “power tripping”, in their own community, on the instance they presumably pay for, is not a rational accusation, since they definitionally cannot exist in a state of less power. What that community is trying to do is use the threat of public shaming to influence behavior. It’s how you get weak moderation and generic communities where bad actors can thrive. A community dedicated to “Stopping bad mods” sounds good on the surface, but it’s an argument made in bad faith.

Why are you putting up with a “shitty” mod? Are you trying to force your speech in a community who has asked you not to?

Great response, thank you. My concern is more so focused on future measures; what happens if/when registration applications are answerable by a bot? It’s not hard to imagine. What happens when a GPT powered bot leaves totally “normal” unique comments 90% of the time, but occasionally recommends a product or pushes a political agenda?

Further, there’s nothing that states an interest-based instance needs any registration. One could imagine a world where local instances have all the users and identities, and the interest based instances simply provide communities to the larger fediverse with no users of their own.

Yes, I’ve had this same thought and I think it’s a great model! If it comes to pass or not remains to be seen. But the concept is good!

“Power tripping mods” definitionally cannot exist on the fediverse where anyone can create an instance or community. Even on Reddit, 99% of the time someone said a mod was “power tripping” it was just a right winger upset that the mod removed their disruptive nonsense.

The purpose of communities like the one you linked to is to shame mods into employing a passive, generic bare-minimum style of moderation, when we should be encouraging the opposite if we want diversity in the fediverse.

What’s the incentive to operate an LLM on the fediverse that is truly helpful and not just trying to secretly sell something/push an agenda?

Any speculation as to what those tools might look like?

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I too think that regional instances would be ideal for a “backbone” of the social web. But at the same time, I feel that interest-based connection is a truly unique strength of the internet and it would be a sad thing to lose to the slop.

Ultimately, I think that more, smaller instances is likely the best “ultimate” defense against slop since there is no incentive for them to scale beyond their needs. But every instance admin is technically responsible for the content on all federated instances. Which can get overwhelming!