For me personally, I never saw too many powermod-driven issues on Reddit (not that they didn’t occur, just that I didn’t experience them in the communities in which I participated).

One solution was to create a fork; lots of “r/actual___” or “r/true___” communities were born this way. To Little8Lost’s point, I think this will be even easier on Lemmy.

On lemmy, you could literally just start the same community on another server. If other people agree with you about space, the new community will become the "default" one. don't really think anybody even has the ability to become "too powerful" because they are neutered the instant the base url changes.

Right now there are people who sign up with an instance like lemmy.world, who then create loads of communities, because they don't fully understand the nature of things and can't quite believe that the URLs for lots of different IPs are available. For Reddit, if you snagged the likes of r/starwars early on, that gave you some power. For Lemmy, it's meaningless: if you just want to moderate 100 communities, and not spend time actually building a Community up, then you'll just be overtaken by the Community at one of the many other instances.

A strategy would be to make an alternative an a different server with the same name and bring people over. Or to contact the server admins about them

It's impossible here in any broad way. If an admin allowed it to go too far, they end up running off users, and possibly end up defederated if it gets really crazy.

There's already duplicates of half the c/s out there, particularly among the reddit copies.

You might think that power admins could be the equivalent problem, but we've already seen problematic instances be defederated widely.

Pretty much every instance out there right now that has enough users to have power mods already has specific rules against going bonkers with moderation.

It's a different system, a different culture, and the ultimate control is decentralized and distributed.

About the only people that could maybe upend that are the lemmy devs themselves, and it isn't like lemmy is impossible to fork. I couldn't do it, but there's plenty of folks that can. And, let's be real, those guys may be on the radical end of their political beliefs, but everything they've done so far points to them handling the project in a very socialist way. They could have forced the entire thing into an echo chamber instead of making it open source. They could have built in controls that would give them the ability to screw with instances remotely, but didn't.

So, nah, power mods aren't going to be a thing on lemmt any time soon. When it does happen, it'll be on single instances and rapidly handled.

I think we lose sight of why "powermods" gained power: they built the big successful communities. Reddit was largely successful due to some fantastic communities being built up, and that takes work. We need that work on Lemmy just as much as we needed it on Reddit.

Yeah, it's not ideal if a small number of people control a large number of communities but we should understand why they got there, and I think the structure of Lemmy is likely to make it a bit less prevalent.

Moderating is hard and requires a set of skills to run moderation cheaply. You're probably going to have a group of known mods on Lemmy doing the same, just because mods with these skills will be sought after.

A bigger issue is that Lemmy seems to be continuing Reddit's practice of mod rank by time only. The implementation of a guild model would be better for mod governance, as it allows for better discussions of mod policy and allow greater input from the invested community.

Of course, trigger happy bans are still going to happen as people troll and worse.

I do think Lemmy instances should have a publicly-visible setting for essentially stating how many communities someone can moderate maximum.

But I doubt it'll be a problem for a while.

Nah, once it become possible to group communities from multiple instances into one (aka multi-reddit on reddit - needs another name on the fediverse), power mods will have no power. Someone could just create an instance with the same community name and it could end up in the community group.