In the early days of this site, it was common to flirt with the idea of running it more democratically. This was correctly deemed unfeasible during the Age of Struggle Sessions and the arbitrary dictatorship of the mods was cemented.
But maybe the problem wasn’t democracy itself, but trying to jump the gun by modeling the site democracy after bourgeois or proletarian democracies. What we need to do is go back to the roots, reform the site to be more like ancient Athenian democracy.
I suggest the first reform is to implement a system of Ostrakismos, where once in a while there is a thread where we can name other users, and if one or more of these comments gets above a certain threshold of upvotes, the named user with the most upvotes on the comment gets banned for a year.
The best part is that voting to find the one true leftist is impossible since the last two wouldn’t be able to get a majority for themselves.
You can always just start your own instance. The technical aspects shouldn’t be hard if you just want a clone of hexbear. Most of the effort goes towards moderation but I guess “democracy” would make that a distributed task.
If you stop me from posting I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.