I mean, it's how internet forums used to work before the era of massive corporate social media. Many forums didn't last, but that's kinda the idea of having many different servers networked together, so there's no single point of failure. I don't wanna handwave that as "oh we'll just churn through people until they burn out and let someone else replace them" because yeah, that sucks. Frankly, it sucks even if you are being paid. I did it for 10 years. You have to get in between every little spat and you're constantly dealing with the absolute worst your userbase has to offer.
But people are willing to do some of that work to build community, and that's how I see the future of social media, at least for myself. All these problems get harder and harder the more people you're dealing with and the less you know them, which is why I've become a proponent of small, focused communities with strong social ties. People are fine with running a Discord server for their friends, and I would love if other forms of social media could work the same way. The more you lower the barrier to entry, the more people can contribute in a way that's not burnout-inducing because that effort get distributed.
I'd love for people to be able to be paid full-time to run good social media (I donate to my Mastodon server so it's hopefully not all out of pocket for them) but frankly it's become apparent this year that even vampiric user-hostile social media is wholly unsustainable, so I'm not really getting my hopes up for that.
