I've done a lot of community moderation in my life. It's been my experience that making things smaller and replacing professional moderation with volunteer moderation is rarely as effective as might be hoped for. Further, once you get past Dunbar's number (about 150), you get the semi-anonymous effect that enables abuses of social networks, much like real cities. There is also a potential wrinkle where people can easily migrate from one forum to another.
Taken together, unless you keep people from migrating from one petty dictatorship to another to find one they like, the outcome will tend towards a small number of big megalopolis-style communities and a middling number of mid-size ones.
It's not a bad idea by any means. It's essentially a mirror of an idealized pre-industrial agrarian society. There might be some wrinkles added by basic human behavior patters that could be worth considering carefully is all.
Taken together, unless you keep people from migrating from one petty dictatorship to another to find one they like, the outcome will tend towards a small number of big megalopolis-style communities and a middling number of mid-size ones.
It's not a bad idea by any means. It's essentially a mirror of an idealized pre-industrial agrarian society. There might be some wrinkles added by basic human behavior patters that could be worth considering carefully is all.
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