If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. If it's free you're a volunteer for the company, if you pay you're a customer.
Just look at the old AOL keywords. People paid for AOL. Didn't matter.
Even in a community, the majority can choose to do things you don't like, just ask anyone who lives in an HOA.
If the roles these moderators played start looking like it was a form of work that's employee misclassification and backpay time.
Mods don't work for reddit, they work for their community/subreddit. Creating a group on a social media platform doesn't make you an employee that can be fired. It makes you a power user that can get banned if you mess with other users/communities or with the platform too much.
I'm part of a community theatre that charges members $20 per year. The membership fee makes you legally a shareholder in the organisation for that year, with voting rights at an annual election where new management is voted in.
There's usually only 50 or so people who vote (most members can't be bothered), so $20 gets you a substantial amount of influence if you can be bothered.
Last year's management are required to step down before the vote starts, making them regular members with a single vote during the re-election process. Usually it's mostly the same people voted back in, but there's always two or three new faces each year.
"Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private"
I have been paying for wiki hosting in the past to create a community (I prefer open source so I've created a much used open source Wiki engine that I and others used for hosting their communities[1]), I've payed for Discourse community hosting, I pay for newsletter hosting [2]. The providers in these cases could not remove me from "my" communities, they could not take "my" (our) content.
[1] One was called Javangelist, long gone but funnily you can find links to it on C2 https://wiki.c2.com/?IcebergSecret [2] I create a CTO community around https://www.amazingcto.com/cto-newsletter/
Committee-run churches are this. Obviously not all churches fit the bill, but many do. Also other many other sort of traditional 'IRL' clubs that collect dues to pay expenses but are run by volunteers elected by the members.
I should say that I used to be a paying subscriber. Not after this I'm not. Now I'm on lemmy.
A lot of people are leaving reddit over this.
There are so many different niches out of what people want out of a reddit replacement though. Some people want anonymous, some don't, some want local mod curation, others want a very broad push-based thing with lots of server feeding, and there are a lot of these underlying disagreements that are underlying a lot of the "what would replace it" thing.
It's always fun until someone starts shitflooding gore and the mods on that server don't handle it and there's some other problem that's the fifth this week. Let alone if you are dependent on nobody else in your group importing them etc. Reputation matters and if your pod is disruptive that doesn't mean anyone decent will federate with you. And your posts could go much farther than intended.
I still think Discord has nailed the social model that is necessary here. Smaller communities with people you know, local control and moderation. But that's not necessarily ActivityPub.
Why do people insist we must pay for nice things?
Reddit should have thought about it shouldn’t they? Not paying mods and content creators means it’s not their content and people don’t have to listen to a handful of glorified web developers.
You seem to think that the users need Reddit more than that Reddit needs its users. I think it’s exactly the other way around.