It’s because people abused mods who banned them and such. I kinda get it.

I personally don’t think that’s the right mindset of how you “vote” on the fediverse, see my comment here: https://feddit.dk/comment/10129007

However, I don’t have a fully formed alternative in mind right now.

The fediverse is already the alternative. The fediverse is democratic, you’re just not thinking about it that way.

It’s not democratic in the sense that you vote for your instance’s admins and your communities’ mods (though that is an option too). It is democratic in the sense that any user chooses their own instance and communities. So if you don’t like your current instance, go to a different one. You vote by choosing your instance and your communities.

Of course if you would like an instance that democratically elects their admins and mods, you are free to go to such an instance (or start your own). But anyone who “loses” the election are also free to simply start their own instance and be an admin anyway, even though they lost. The users who voted for the losing candidate could then just go to that instance. And then we’re kinda back to the same situation: you vote by choosing an instance and that’s a good thing.

I’m afraid that URL will still not work 😅. It still will just lead to lemmy.ml, I think. Unless your client does some magic to fix it.

!community@domain is the way to link to other communities. Doesn’t work in the URL field of posts though, it’s custom Lemmy markdown behaviour.

Actual link for other instances: [email protected]