I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product. … The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”

I think this is a great point, it doesn’t help much to create a business that ends up with the same incentives and the same end-game as the existing systems.

So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.

That is precisely what I’m looking to build. I don’t want to get rich, I want people without 10 years of industry experience to get some of the benefits we have all been able to build for ourselves.