This is something that has been on my mind as well - centralized platforms such as Reddit et al. are functionally monarchies, but the Fediverse is functionally feudal… which, y’know, isn’t great… the thing is, I’m not sure how we can solve this problem, and I’ve thought about it quite a bit over the years. The root of the issue is that there is no way to preserve privacy and also ensure that every user is a real human and not a bot/sockpuppet or whatever, so any forms of democracy are dead on arrival on the Internet. The only thing I can really think of would be a real-world fully mutual co-operative that requires in-person voting to decide on issues, but obviously that would mean that instances would need to be tied to a real-world location. I suppose live video calls might be possible, but idk… with modern AI deepfakes, even that might be prone to manipulation by malicious actors. Until we’ve got a solution to that problem, I think federated feudal states is about the best we can do, and it’s a vast improvement over the monarchic alternative.