Yeah, not a choice any of us who work in tech can make. But the small choices we CAN make do add up significantly.

Gemini is just a web replacement protocol. With basic things we remember from olden days Web, but with everything non-essential removed, for a client to be doable in a couple of days. I have my own Gemini viewer, LOL. This for me seems a completely different application from torrents. I was dreaming for a thing similar to torrent trackers for aggregating storage and computation and indexing and search, with search and aggregation and other services' responses being structured and standardized, and cryptographic identities, and some kind of market services to sell and buy storage and computation in unified and pooled, but transparent way (scripted by buyer\seller), similar to MMORPG markets, with the representation (what is a siloed service in modern web) being on the client native application, and those services allowing to build any kind of client-server huge system on them, that being global. But that's more of a global Facebook\Usenet\whatever, a killer of platforms. Their infrastructure is internal, while their representation is public on the Internet. I want to make infrastructure public on the Internet, and representation client-side, sharing it for many kinds of applications. Adding another layer to the OSI model, so to say, between transport and application layer. For this application: I think you could have some kind of Kademlia-based p2p with groups voluntarily joined (involving very huge groups) where nodes store replicas of partitions of group common data based on their pseudo-random identifiers and/or some kind of ring built from those identifiers, to balance storage and resilience. If a group has a creator, then you can have replication factor propagated signed by them, and membership too signed by them. But if having a creator (even with cryptographically delegated decisions) and propagating changes by them is not ok, then maybe just using whole data hash, or it's bittorrent-like info tree hash, as namespace with peers freely joining it can do. Then it may be better to partition not by parts of the whole piece, but by info tree? I guess making it exactly bittorrent-like is not a good idea, rather some kind of block tree, like for a filesystem, and a separate piece of information to lookup which file is in which blocks. If we are doing directory structure. Then, with freely joining it, there's no need in any owners or replication factors, I guess just pseudorandom distribution of hashes will do, and each node storing first partitions closest to its hash. Now thinking about it, such a system would be not that different from bittorrent and can even be interoperable with it. There's the issue of updates, yes, hence I've started with groups having hierarchy of creators, who can make or accept those updates. Having that and the ability to gradually store one group's data to another group, it should be possible to do forks of a certain state. But that line of thought makes reusing bittorrent only possible for part of the system. The whole database is guaranteed to be more than a normal HDD (1 TB? I dunno). Absolutely guaranteed, no doubt at all. 1 TB (for example) would be someone's collection of favorite stuff, and not too rich one.

My understanding is that, in broad strokes... Aurora acts like a proxy or mirror that doesn't require you to sign in to get Google Play Store apps. It doesn't provide any other software besides what you specifically download from it, and it doesn't include any telemetry/tracking like normal Google Play Store would. microG is a reimplementation of Google Play services (the suite of proprietary background services that Google runs on normal Android phones). MicroG doesn't have the bloat and tracking and other closed source functionality, but rather acts as a stand-in that other apps can talk to (when they'd normally be talking to Google Play services). This has to be installed and configured and I would refer to the microG github or other documentation. GrapheneOS has its own sandboxed Google Play Services which is basically unmodified Google Play Services, crammed into its own sandbox with no special permissions, and a compatibility layer that retains some functionality while keeping it from being able to access app data with high level permissions like it would normally do on a vanilla Android phone.

Saying 'don't downvote' is the flammable inflammable conundrum, both don't and do parse as do.

I think you're missing some key points. Any file hosting service, no matter what, will have to deal with CSAM as long as people are able to upload to it. No matter what. This is an inescapable fact of hosting and the internet in general. Because CSAM is so ubiquitous and constant, one can only do so much to moderate any services, whether they're a large corporation are someone with a server in their closet. All of the larger platforms like 'meta', google, etc., mostly outsource that moderation to workers in developing countries so they don't have to also provide mental health counselling, but that's another story. The reason they own their own hardware is because the hosting services can and will disable your account and take down your servers if there's even a whiff of CSAM. Since it's a constant threat, it's better to own your own hardware and host everything from your closet so you don't have to eat the downtime and wait for some poor bastard in Nigeria to look through your logs and reinstate your account (not sure how that works exactly though).

If I went to the USA now, they'd probably put me there after looking at my social media activity anyway

If you want a narrative, look at all the full-price $250k Roadster pre-orders they've been holding onto for like 8 years now with zero signs of production and complete silence for the last...5 years?