cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5257349
Fore some times, mastodon has been unsafe for black and other minorities users, the peoples impacted by this have been complaining about it openly, emphasizing the lack of good moderation tools to make instances safer. The 
s on the dev team and userbase however have essentially plugged their ears and refused to listen, and instead engaged in bad faith, tone policing, minimizing racism, dismissing the testimony of black users, and telling them to "curate their experience better" with filters and blocks (even though a big part of the complaint is that this doesn't work).
Seeing this, some black peoples who have been complaining about racism on mastodon and the lack of security features to deal with it have taken things in their own hands and made a fork of Mastodon named Awujo.
How can this issue be mitigated? The current system of a (usually not so) benevolent dictator(s) is the model for all FOSS projects I know of, lemmy included. As you've touched on, this is not at all democratic. However, I don't know if there are any version control hosting platforms (gitea, forgejo, etc.) that work without the code being held in the iron fist of an authoritarian code monkey. Then there is the issue of who should be allowed to contribute; there needs to be a way of keeping out people who contribute malware, or from taking so much control that they themselves become a code tyrant without a king code monkey to spitefully swat down improvements.
Even if those issues are resolved, there is still the massive gulf in power between code monkeys and non-technical users. If none of the code monkeys deign to implement features or bug fixes that non-technical users want or need, then those users are shit out of luck. Another wrench is thrown into things when it's software that runs on a server and there are also sysadmins who could pull the plug at any time even if a democratic system was built into the software.
I guess what I'm getting at is: what is a way to make FOSS as anarchic as possible without opening holes that bad actors could easily exploit and without leaving users incapable of making code be beholden to the code monkeys? The main thing FOSS has going for it is that its governance isn't as shit as how tech companies would handle it, and that's a very low bar to get over.