Cooperation Denton (TX)@coop@denton.social
In our talk with the Denton library board a few months ago, we discussed exactly this problem. We advocated for municipally run, federated social media. If every city was running a Mastodon instance right now, we would be having a different conversation entirely.
Fully hosted setups such as https://masto.host only require non-technical moderation. These solutions cost as little as five cents per user per month. Coupled with library quality placemaking, we could finally establish a virtual commons worthy of the investment.
Building out municipally federating social media infrastructure would solve the Elon problem while also dealing with several Fediverse downsides. Most of those downsides are social, not technical, in origin - poor moderation, instance implosions, unassisted learning curves, lacking network effect, etc. This could be easily solved by public investment and stewardship.
Social media is public information infrastructure. A huge part of our society's epistemic crisis is that we are leaving many people's primary access to information in the hands of the very people who most benefit from them being misinformed. We can solve that for pennies a month.