Self-hosting. Otherwise you’re forever limited to whatever the service provider’s understaffed moderation team translated from the corporate email and plugged into the filters this afternoon.
While self-hosting is a good option for us developers, I'm pretty sure that most normal people will not do it. So to reach the critical mass needed to make an open source project financially viable, I don't think we can rely on self-hosting.
As an addendum, this is also where (extended-family-level or city-wide) community-hosting comes in though unless your services are federated or have other attractors, it's difficult to attract users.
You’re not wrong, but since service providers control what happens on their servers, and have no obligation to allow any particular speech, then self-hosting (or its close cousin, federation) are the only ways to assert publication control of your own posts.
> look into how one can adapt the "free speech" open source spirit to work for services
Unless you want to treat service providers as public utilities, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea, just an uphill battle.
Yes, we should look into how one can adapt the "free speech" open source spirit to work for services.