The part that people can't do themselves is the massive storage and indexing of posts/content/uploaded data (because expensive). I'm envisioning a more or less

The part that people can't do themselves is the massive storage and indexing of posts/content/uploaded data (because expensive). I'm envisioning a more or less public (hosting is publically funded) API where anyone can build and host their own frontend, with each custom frontend having their own content discovery algorithm(s) and custom moderation options based on the underlying data and indexes provided by the API. What I mean is that the publically hosted API itself will be minimally moderated, hosting anything except for illegal material. The rest will be solved by (highly granular and specific) indexing/tagging or similar such that each frontend can choose to leave out or otherwise moderate the presentation of certain material. That indexing will also be the basis of writing custom content discovery algorithms. The API could even allow training of AI models on usage data (for recommendation or moderation) without leaking anything by declaring a set of available parameters and offering to train and deploy models proposed by the public. This way we won't have to leave the innovation and the making-it-fun-and-usable parts fully up to the government, and we will hopefully avoid government-enforced censorship.