"Membership is a question they ask a server" is a bogus sentence. "membership" is not a "question". It's syntactically valid semantic nonsense.
"Membership is dictated by a server" is one of several human sentences saying what that one is trying to.
https://github.com/rayfish/rayfish/commit/c49816e6dfba19e91a...
Also that sentence structure is very claudelike.