Edit- thanks for offers to help. I do have one small project that is a step in the right direction and I might have it up ready to go (at least a start) in the next week or two. I will post again and link to this post when I do, and PM people below. Is there some way to get connected now that our communities have been nuked so people can share skills ideas and projects and collaborate?
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I've been thinking a lot about alternative content sharing platforms and the problems they face for the past few years and also wrote my CS diploma thesis somewhat related to this (not saying college matters, I regret wasting my time there). One of the biggest issues I see is the network effect: established mainstream platforms have a huge advantage because of the amount of content that their large amount of users produce (this includes comments). The vast amount of content further incentivises people to use an established platform, rather than joining a new one.
What I think we really need is a "meta" video sharing platform. Take video sharing platforms for example: this meta platform would fetch content from YouTube, BitChute, Odysee, Rumble and store the metadata on its servers. It would implement its own search and recommendation (discovery) engine. This solves the challenge every new alternative platform faces: lack of (diverse) content.
It would also allow registered users to add multiple existing video sharing platforms via OAuth (crucially YouTube) and when they would upload a video it would post it to all the different platforms the user has added to their account. On this "meta" platform same video on multiple platforms would be seen as one video, with comments/likes from multiple platforms merged together. This means the content (including comments) posted on this meta platform would also be seen directly on YouTube by people who never heard of this platform.
I would focus on the following meta platforms the most:
Platforms of this type would need a lot of compute (scraping all content from other platforms, indexing, recommendations). Storage requirements could be reduced by only storing the metadata and textual data, while embedding the videos directly from YouTube.
I think platforms of this type would face a lot of legal challenges, since the most effective way to build it would be to scrape the publicly available data from YouTube /Twitter/FB (since fetching the content via an API can be easily disabled by BIG tech). Most of the legal challenges are the result of years of lobbying by BIG tech - they are only legal, not moral challenges, since the content on those platforms is in principle made and owned by its users, not the platform itself. Making the project open source and allowing anyone to host an instance is one way I see to make it more resilient and hard to shut down, even in the face of legal pressures.
I'd be happy to answer any questions someone might have and brainstorm the most ideal implementation further.
I don't really see a way for a platform like this to make much profit (except in the very long run if it gets really popular). One possible way to make money would be with ads but it would have to be Blockchain based since it's probably not legal under the current law (which is also the reason I suspect no one has built something like this yet AFAIK).
But I think a better approach that basing it on ads would be similar to what some other open source projects take (e.g. Signal, mostly donations). The donations would primarily fund development team, while the people hosting the instances (taking the biggest risk by probably breaking the law) could also collect donations via Bitcoin. By having a distributed design it should be relatively easy to set up your own server. Trusted servers would also exchange data P2P, and this would drastically reduce the compute power required to run an instance, since each e.g. YouTube video metadata/comments would only need to be scraped by few/one instance and sent to the rest directly. Also when setting up new instance it would copy all the data directly from another trusted instance greatly reducing setup time.
A lot of people are really angry with big tech censorship and if this is the way to inflict maximum damage to them, it will be easier to motivate volunteers to efficiently run a network like this - also easier to collect donations / grow user base. I think the timing and the current situation is the biggest advantage a platform like this would have.
I've worked on a project (similar to Gab's Dissenter) with the aim to bring a comment section to every webpage, so I'm familiar with the challenges new social platforms face. That's also the reason I've spent some time thinking about this idea, but I did not start working on it.