  Online discourse takes place in corporate-controlled spaces thought by users
to be public realms. These platforms in name enable free speech but in practice
implement varying degrees of censorship either by government edict or by uneven
and unseen corporate policy. This kind of censorship has no countervailing
accountability mechanism, and as such platform owners, moderators, and
algorithms shape public discourse without recourse or transparency.
  Systems research has explored approaches to decentralizing or democratizing
Internet infrastructure for decades. In parallel, the Internet censorship
literature is replete with efforts to measure and overcome online censorship.
However, in the course of designing specialized open-source platforms and
tools, projects generally neglect the needs of supportive but uninvolved
`average' users. In this paper, we propose a pluralistic approach to
democratizing online discourse that considers both the systems-related and
user-facing issues as first-order design goals.
