The alternative is simple.. Go dark. VPN tech is known from like 30 years. Pretty much everyone can use it (VPN providers). But instead using it to browse net, build VPN overlay networks of interest for people. Gaming networks, R&D networks, Retro Networks. People will peer to PoP and use resources. Bad actor? BAN it from network. You have control. This could be done in Internet, but big corpos and big money won the battle. Just wake F*ing up...

Continuing on your suggestion.

There could be open source tooling to create custom private "closednets", with

- trust ring mechanism to allow invitations, flagging, banning, and banning those that invite people who were banned

- the rules of the closednet

- search engine with opt-in scraping

- portal (remember the 80s?) with all the registered nodes, perhaps by service category such as public git repo hosts, web sites etc.

etc.

The first closednet could be Hacker News.