Well, it went great for a short while. After a couple of years it started to get worse though. A small group of people started posting racist comments and topics. Long term members would then ask why this racism was allowed, and I defended their free speech. Then I started to lose some of the friendly regulars from the community. They got tired of being insulted, and if the community didn't censor of remove racist comments, they argued I was supporting them and giving them a platform to spread hate.
As I watched the community degrade, I realized censorship would be required if I wanted the community to develop into what I envisioned and so I changed course.
In short, no censorship is going to give you a certain type of community, so before starting consider if this is the type of social network you want to bring into the world.
Anything that requires accounts on a server will be perverted by profit motives, or heavy censorship. We need to sort out our own hosting, with multiple competing aggregators. Basically, the original web, rebooted.
Have you considered what a truly censorship free world would be like? Are we really mature enough as a species or society for this yet?
This is all rather easily averted and solved if someone actually cared, but no one cares.
The problem could be solved by a sort of KYC (know your customer) rule that then is used to silo the platform on a per country basis.
Imagine a reddit that consisted ONLY of your countrymen's genuine comments, without any bots or alt accounts, without any foreign state actors repeatedly pumping divisive stuff to the top.
Further, imagine a sort of certificate authority for identity per the KYC systen.
Americans using this free speech platform could all be anonymous to eachother, but still visible to the feds if they used the platform to post illegal content. There would then be no need or reason to censor speech. People could talk of taboo subjects freely and openly behind their usernames without having foreign ragebots in a Russian trollfarm tur ing it into a flamewar.
You know, maybe Trump's team that recieved huge investment would build such a thing. Who knows.