I appreciate that you’re raising this in good faith because it is a complex issue. But I see real problems with the idea that infrastructure becomes morally owned by the community once it gets big enough.
Unless that community is actually paying the bills, this so-called moral obligation just shifts the burden onto the one footing the costs. That doesn’t strike me as moral at all.
And online communities are transient by nature. People show up, feel invested for a while, then disappear. To act as if their fleeting sense of ownership creates a lasting obligation on the admin is unrealistic.
There’s also what Ortega y Gasset warned about in The Revolt of the Masses. When something is said to be “owned by the community,” it rarely means real stewardship. It means the mass asserts itself and the loudest voices dictate terms. That isn’t democracy. It’s populism built on top of a hierarchy.
Because if the software itself is hierarchical but claims to be “for the masses,” that isn’t democracy either. It’s a pyramid structure dressed up in populist rhetoric. The admin still has the keys. The mods still enforce. The users still depend on both.
That’s why I insist on my own server. I’d rather be upfront: I curate and maintain a space I’m willing to take responsibility for. That’s not authoritarian and it’s not populist. It’s just owning what I host instead of pretending the power structure doesn’t exist.