I've seen and heard attempts over the years to make the administration more civic in that exact sense - elected admins, elected mods and so on. But a) these quickly run the risk of becoming popularity contests rather than competence contests and b) forums have one thing townships in that vein do not: direct personal liability.
If I set up a forum, I personally am legally responsible for what goes on in that space. It's my hosting account, the costs to run it are borne by me. So too the risks and rewards that come with that.
It's a little bit different to a township in that regard; the town charter might make an individual or groups of individuals responsible and accountable for preservation of justice in the town (functionally equivalent to the mayor electing a sheriff and their deputies), but the town charter presumably implies that the town's ownership is in spirit to the townspeople as a common good, such that any liabilities in its running are borne equally out of local taxes.
It's actually, then, a social problem we're talking about rather than a technological one. How do we shift the balance of power away from the fundamental requirement of a (reasonably) benevolent dictator for life? Because that's the reality of today: functioning communities function because the mayor of the town *runs the town*. They're the sheriff, running the bad folks out of town; they're the city ordnance making sure the trash collection is done; they're the contract holder with the utilities providers ensuring that there are the relevant utilities hooked up for the town's collective benefit.
Now, if we're talking about protecting one's social contributions in the form of written works, the answer is surprisingly low-tech: if you value it, make a copy of it. Because even if we talk about adversial admins, we have to remember that not all adversial situations are intentional: how many forums have disappeared because the admin died and there was no way to hand over the forum to anyone else? How much has been lost through no-fault situations?
Interestingly I did see one semi-solution proposed to this many years ago on SMF. There was a guy called gri, whose posts were often incoherent, hard to read, as if badly written Russian was shoved into a bad Google Translate and turned into English and then messed about with by someone whose English was about as good as their Russian. But if you sat back and pieced it together, he had an idea: the notion that forums would produce 'grivitniks' and 'grivoutniks' which were essentially forums having a mirror copy of each other with posts flowing both out (grivoutniks) and in (grivitniks). You'd connect forums together and the forums would sort of mirror each other in an accountability sense; you couldn't edit your posts without it being flagged as an edit, but neither could other forums you'd twinned with. Of course, moderation was a constant battle and unconsidered in its fullest extremes, but gri was one of the few people I've ever met that I could genuinely consider a free speech absolutionist in the non-pejorative sense (everyone else I ever heard using that phrase or its variants meant 'free speech for me to say what I like without consequence', while gri meant it that everyone could say what they liked but there *were* consequences and you would be accountable because everyone else would have the receipts; sort of like a Fediverse but one that could actually have worked with more thought). Most people wrote him off as a troll, though.
While we're on the subject, the Fediverse doesn't solve the problem either; ActivityPub gives you some ability to let your contributions flow between nodes but it still has fundamental points of failure engineered into it - if your home node goes away or you get banned from it, sucks to be you.
I should also add, I have seen what happens in an environment where the admins were elected and given some duties as sworn members of a legal entity (company) that existed to protect the IP of the forum, and the folks were rotated through the company as elections happened. It ended poorly after there was basically a mutiny from key contributors and then then-admins went into a 'you'll never prise it from us' mood. Acrimonious to say the least. People that invest time and energy deserve for their faith to be rewarded, especially if they invest years of time and even money on top.
Welcome to Admin Junkies