TLDR: The r/selfhosted subreddit has a Discord server. The owner’s account got hacked leaving the server in a precarious state. They submitted a support ticket, but Discord has not taken action in weeks and probably won’t at all, so they are considering starting a new Discord server.
I think the only safeguard against that is to do your own moderation. The only tool I can think of that would even come close to detecting “power tripping” would be AI, and we all know that would end terribly. The best you can do is remove incentives (somehow, idk) so mods aren’t rewarded for a bad ban.
It does seem like wildly unregulated territory, unfortunately.
I have ideas I’ve brainstormed though:
Minimum number of moderaters once a certain user threshold has been reached (So if you have above 1k-5k users, you need a minimum of 2 or 3 mods)?
Ability to report servers for incompetent moderation?
There’s a line eventually where discord stops being a place where “friends hang out” and becomes a platform to engage with a community.
That’s the point where moderation should be regulated.
Just my two cents anyway.
Honestly, every platform has the same problem, including real life countries. There’s always the possibility that whatever power is enforcing the rules is corrupted and doesn’t listen to anyone else. The mechanisms for fairly determining both what the rules should be and how to enforce them are always evolving as people find new ways to do bad things.
The fediverse is a nice system because it allows people to leave and make their own communities if the admins become toxic, incentivizing them to actually listen to users. I can only hope we don’t get overrun my AI slop like the rest of the internet.