On top of being highly vulnerable to infiltration, voting for who holds the keys has a real “the people want faster horses” vibe imo. Voting is useful when consensus building has failed or is infeasible due to scale. It’s a solution to a human problem. Meanwhile, centralization of the resources required to run a platform is a technical problem, albeit a really difficult one. Non-blockchain decentralization is still in its infancy (or maybe adolescence?). Lots of room for growth and exploration there.

I think when we see Democracy as the set of political methods by which we decentralize authority, the idea that we should maintain centralized authority and simply force it to change hands regularly is a solution that would only ever arise when simpler solutions were materially infeasible. Representative democracy was a decent compromise when the goal was to allow the new bourgeoisie to resolve internal disputes without a central authority during a time when our fastest means of communication was horses carrying bags of paper. On the flip side of that, fluid democracy would require a massive and unwieldy bureaucracy if it were attempted before modern computers were widely available. It’s all very materially based.

On the topic of decentralized platforms, is anyone here familiar with Veilid? Seems like the creators are sufficiently anti-blockchain that this may check a bunch of the boxes I’ve been looking for in decentralized frameworks.