Online communities are still catching up to my mother's garden club

The author argues that online communities default to what they call "implicit feudalism," in which admins and moderators hold nearly unchecked power, unlike the democratic bylaws that let a neighborhood garden club govern itself for decades. Ordinary users have little way to hold admins accountable, and online democracy usually appears only through extensive planning and custom software, as in Wikipedia and Debian. Pointing to steps such as the Contributor Covenant, the Python board elected after Guido van Rossum resigned in 2018, and the layered Linux ecosystem, the author calls for institutional diversity and modular governance tools that communities can adopt as easily as apps.