Experimental thought, but something I want to do in near future.
Basically admins and mods are selected sortitionally( randomly) from people who apply.
All admins and mods have fixed term limits.
Existence of Mod or Admin trials where a public chat(court) decides consequences for their actions, if they misbehave, could lead to
Ever since I learnt about the sortition system, I was incredibly curious how it would work irl, hence this idea.
Look, I am not going to claim this is a solution to anything, till ones actually up and running I think it’s hard to say which direction it will go. But still, I want your opinion on it.
On How to encourage people to mod a community?
By making mod duty easy for them, have small term limits, and in those term limits they only have to work for 4/3 days a week. Term could be just few weeks. Also get lot more mods and give them specific time slots beyond which they are vastly not needed unless an emergency.
Still needs an instance owner who is legally responsible for all the content on the entire site - this way the police know who to come for if there is illegal content like CSAM. At that point, better make sure that the admins are trustworthy individuals who have been vetted more extensively than simply having applied.
But sounds a great way to engender a sense of ownership among mods (& perhaps those admins who were vetted).
Btw PieFed also has several features that implement democratization of moderation, lessening the work that a mod traditionally is forced to do on Lemmy since the end-users can do the thing on their own, aided with software. e.g. if someone wants to see less content about Musk or Trump, then keyword filters provide that option (All, Some, or None), rather than a moderator having to decide for all of the community members at once. Or if someone wants to avoid contentious content, they can hide or just collapse (requiring an extra click to read) comments below a certain (user-definable) score threshold. Or NSFW content can be blurred, rather than simply allowed vs. removed; also NSFW is distinguished from NSFL (gore). Also fwiw, moderator reports federate, and someone is actually notified if their content is removed or if they are banned, plus much more - PieFed already allows much more democratic processes than the more authoritarian-styled Lemmy provides for (I believe there is even a deeper description of administrative roles built right in). So you may want to read about that. See also this article.
However it is accomplished, it sounds like a grand experiment!
Csam is gonna be the ultimate hurdle I am gonna have to cross. Lot of traditional csam protections involve protection against already existing images on the internet, and even those software are becoming sparser these days.