I think it is important to add that even though no system is perfect and every system has it's pros and cons, that doesn't make them equal. As soon as we define goals, for example equal rights, some systems will be better equipped at achieving those while others might be actively hostile to them.

I don't think you're saying anything contrary but I wanted to make one point clear.

The democracy we live under is not unique to capitalism. In fact, our current system has less democracy than an anarchist system would. Also capitalism doesn't have any requirement to be democratic. Whereas with anarchism, any dictatorship is directly against the core tenets of the system.

That being said, (I have not read enough theory to know for sure but) anarchism doesn't necessarily preclude the idea of having managers or even CEO's. It does preclude those positions having total power and control of an enterprise though. Dismantling the hierarchical structure of modern society doesn't mean having someone be a coordinator of a larger group isn't helpful. It just means that job isn't given greater power or more significance than those being coordinated. Our current idea of a CEO is very dictatorial, but that's not how it has to be.

bear in mind here that i’m very much not well-versed in anarchist philosophy, but

servers are mostly structured hierarchical with admins and mods and users

i think even in systems like direct democracy (afaik a kind of anarchy because people directly vote on everything?) it doesn’t really scale and you end up needing to elect someone to make implementation decisions toward the overall goals of the society

the key is that it should be very easy to replace that person, and they should have no real “power” other than things that people would mostly come to the same conclusions about anyway - they’re an administrator, a knowledge worker, and their job is procedural

in the fediverse, we join servers whereby we agree to their rules. moderators and admins are a procedural role that is about interpreting and implementing those rules. we can replace them at any time by changing servers and our loss is minimal - less so on mastodon because of the account transfer feature! thus their power over us is always an individual choice and not something that is forced upon us either explicitly or implicitly

Servers are heirarchic, but heirarchy is optional; the lower level members are free to leave at any time.

It's not a perfect model, but it's decently close. If Lemmy had a way to distribute server ownership to a group of individuals, that would be even closer.

If I was a whiz at developing, I would love to build that kind of feature.

I understand your concern of external threats to an anarchistic society, but I would just remind you that plenty of centralized governments/societies have also been conquered by other centralized powers. Being centralized by no means protects you from that threat. I think the more relevant factor is just overall size of the opposing force.

It doesn't matter how weak hamsters are compared to you. If enough of them attack you endlessly, eventually you will succumb, if for no other reason than pure exhaustion lol.

However, there are clear examples IRL of far smaller and weaker decentralized forces successfully resisting a much more powerful centralized force. The VietCong vs the USA in Vietnam, the Mujahideen vs the USSR in Afghanistan, the American Revolutionary forces vs England, the French Resistance vs the Nazis, etc.

I would highly recommend the YouTuber, Anark. He has fantastic content discussing all aspects of anarchism, including defense. He also has links to many other great resources to learn about Anarchism.

There's a lot of classic books on anarchy. I think Peter Kropotato[sic] has a lot of stuff written before the Russian revolution that goes heavily into why capitalism and feudalism both suck.

Thank you for reading it :)