Before diving into the whole open/closed misunderstanding and conflict, it helps to step back and look at the different roles inside a project, and who has the power to say yes or no at each level. A healthy project usually has something like this structure:
admin
mod
producer
user
reader
The real difference between “closed” and “open” systems is mostly about where power sits inside this stack. In a “closed” system, power is concentrated at the top – admins control everything, moderation is restricted, producers have little autonomy, users are mostly passive consumers, and readers have no meaningful agency at all.
This is the standard #dotcons model, centralised control with limited participation. In a more “open” system, power shifts downward toward the producers and community.
- The reader still has little direct power because they have no real buy-in yet. They are consuming information, not helping shape the space.
- The “user” gains a small amount of power through posting, commenting, tagging, reacting, and participating from their own account.
- The “producer” is where things start becoming socially valuable. Producers create content, organise discussions, document knowledge, and help sustain the commons. Once producers become trusted through practice and participation, they should naturally begin moving toward moderation roles.
- The “mod” should hold as much practical power as possible without endangering the stability of the instance or project. Moderation works best when it is close to the lived reality of the community rather than imposed from above.
- The “admin” still needs strong technical power because someone has to maintain infrastructure, security, backups, federation, and legal responsibility. But socially, there should be a very strong cultural rule against using that power casually or politically.
In a healthy #openweb project, the day-to-day running of the space should mostly sit with the mod/producer layer, not with the admin layer. That distinction matters, admins maintain infrastructure, mods and producers maintain community.
When admins dominate community decisions, projects tend to slide toward enclosure, control, fear, and eventually stagnation. A recent example, this is what happened with #socialhub in the Fediverse. The path to making this work is social mediation through the #4opens, combined with transparent audit logs and visible decision-making, this creates accountability without needing rigid top-down control.
The goal is not “no power.” That is fantasy, the goal is to distribute power socially, visibly, and responsibly, so communities can self-organise without constantly collapsing into either chaos or authoritarian control. That balance is the real challenge of the #openweb path.
