This is an interesting project by all means, but I'm curious as to what your goal/vision for this project is. The reason that most online forum-esque services involve some sort of moderation isn't because they give in to the so-called "woke SJW Twitter mob", it's because they want to expand their user bases - a platform cannot host large amounts of sexist content and attract women, it cannot stop taking action against content that is racist and expect a multicultural user base, and so forth.
As for an intial starting point, it makes sense that you are looking to capture users that have been kicked off places like Reddit, FB, or can't participate on Parler any longer and I'm sure you will have success within that target group if you are able to get this off the ground. However, I'm not sure where you're going to get new users from after that - and without a more diverse user base, you are not only limiting the spread of ideas from your platform to elsewhere but are also creating an echo chamber where people who self-select for "my views are not tolerable in the mainstream" are the only ones who are talking. This problem will get worse over time, and make it even harder to attract new users.
Like you say in your blog post, a major source of frustration with existing technology is that "They prefer purity to practicality". It seems an awful lot like you are trying to do the same thing here, and while this project will certainly be entertaining, I'm not sure how viable this will end up being - I'm having a hard time seeing this as anything other than another Voat/Ruqqus.
In the post, they mention that each board will be moderated (filtered) by the creator, and the same goes for thread creators. Effectively it comes down to content creation and filters that can live on the client-side.
Any decentralized unauthenticated or federated social network faces the same issues around reputation, moderation and sybil attacks. Matrix, for example, has the same.
I imagine over time we'll get a growing economy of curation markets - users choose their own maintainers for allow/deny-lists and content discovery, effectively allowing them to use these networks in a way that is meaningful to them.
Some of these mechanisms are explored quite heavily by people in the Ethereum space - not necessarily with social networks in mind, but I think these kinds of mechanisms are going to play a more important role in our world in the coming decades (lest we go deeper into centralized control)
Yeah, so Ruqqus does something very similar at the moment - using "guilds" and allowing individuals to maintain their own. The problem is with the people that the platform attracts - basically every guild on Ruqqus is something along the lines of "blackcrimesmatter" or "wakeupwhitepeople" not because the site is explicitly disincentivizing people with other beliefs from joining but because the audience is self-selected (people who think Pepe is a symbol of resistance) and because it's hard to end up with a diverse userbase. Decentralized networks where participants interact are still bound by the laws of human behavior, and people aren't going to frequent a space where they aren't welcome. The reason that Matrix 'works' is because there is no cross-cluster interaction: I have a server set up where I can chat with friends, but have no reason to interact with the pretty horrible use cases. Sites like these, on the other hand, are designed to normalize those use cases and encourage you to join those communities.
As for an intial starting point, it makes sense that you are looking to capture users that have been kicked off places like Reddit, FB, or can't participate on Parler any longer and I'm sure you will have success within that target group if you are able to get this off the ground. However, I'm not sure where you're going to get new users from after that - and without a more diverse user base, you are not only limiting the spread of ideas from your platform to elsewhere but are also creating an echo chamber where people who self-select for "my views are not tolerable in the mainstream" are the only ones who are talking. This problem will get worse over time, and make it even harder to attract new users.
Like you say in your blog post, a major source of frustration with existing technology is that "They prefer purity to practicality". It seems an awful lot like you are trying to do the same thing here, and while this project will certainly be entertaining, I'm not sure how viable this will end up being - I'm having a hard time seeing this as anything other than another Voat/Ruqqus.