Selfhosted

limit federation to a single-signon and private messages.

But then you completely lose content when someone disables their account, and most people don't want to host anyway.

My approach is a P2P service that's similar to that, but instead of storing your stuff, you store some amount of other peoples' stuff, such that there are multiple copies of any piece of content distributed randomly across the globe.

However, moderation gets tricky here. I think a transitive trust system can work well. Basically, Alice trusts Bob to some degree, Bob trusts Carol to some degree, so Alice trusts Carol to some lesser degree. If content falls below some trust level, Alice doesn't see it or store it. Bob and Carol don't even need to be people, there can be bots to detect things like CSAM and other illegal content.

The net result is that everyone's experience is tailored to them, which hopefully makes things like shilling, trolling, and astroturfing less prevalent for those who curate their trust network more effectively. And this curation doesn't need to be manual, it can be automatic based on how you react to content. In other words, everyone is a moderator, and you trust people who moderate similarly to you.

The intent here is to solve a bunch of different problems:

• prevent content from disappearing
• eliminate power hungry mods
• reduce cost of operation - this only requires a handful of servers to help connect nodes
• limit effectiveness of bad actors

There are certainly issues, such as:

• bad actors can use the network to share illegal content (everyone else just won't see it)
• hard to bootstrap - what does the new user experience look like?
• what does an account mean without a central server? This is a similar problem as simplex has.
• what's the killer feature to attract regular people vs the criminals?

And some interesting side effects:

• since it's P2P, you can sneaker net it behind firewalls (e.g. China) to facilitate global free speech
• everyone's device can add resources to the network, so the barrier to self-hosting is zero
• interesting options for localizing data - communities for a region will be super responsive for people in that region because there are more interested nodes; could maybe find new communities by local popularity

Given the downsides, I'm not completely convinced it's worth it, hence the hesitation. But anything that requires users to have a publicly facing server is DOA, so this seems like the most approachable option.