Sure thing, I'd be happy to! I definitely get where you're coming from with some of it.
To address the first concern, that statement was released under the previous CEO, Jeffrey Edell. He never really acted on his view toward censorship, but even so, he's no longer with the company. He has since been succeeded by Carlos Betancourt, who has doubled down on both the free speech aspect, as well as the privacy aspect. Obviously, MeWe isn't Gab, there is an expectation of civility, but you're allowed to speak your mind otherwise. If you're curious about the ideals of Carlos, he was just on the 100x Podcast where he goes over some of this: https://youtu.be/B-peHYZVfVE
Regarding the reporting aspect, every social network has that, just as every major online community in history has had some form of reporting. Even Nostr has reporting to some degree, though relays don't have to act or honor reports. Free speech is one thing but in order to cultivate a pleasant community, you have to make sure that people are being adults and not causing chaos & drama when none needed to exist.
Things are still in the works with Soshi but Soshi itself is more like a rewards program and governance scheme. The blockchain that powers MeWe's back-end for user data & ownership is called Frequency, and it was specifically designed for MeWe and to enable other social networks to build upon it. The concept is that you own your social graph and can port it over to other social apps built on Frequency. Soshi is essentially building the foundations of a plan to boost and reward engagement within MeWe communities. As I said, it's still pretty early with Soshi, more will be revealed on that soon.
To address your other concern about decentralization, it's not decentralized at the app level, but I'm not sure if that's in the works or not. When I refer to it as a decentralized social media platform, I mean that the infrastructure is decentralized. This goes back to the concept of Frequency.
As for DSNP, that was the original concept and protocol that Frequency was based off of. MeWe received a major investment from Frank McCourt's McCourt Global, as part of their nonprofit initiative, "Project Liberty", which is a research group intended to experiment and fund projects to push social networking back to a user-centric, democratized approach rather than having a singular company dictate everything. In the case of MeWe, to strongly simplify, Frequency laid the foundation for the user-centric part, while Soshi is building the way to incentivize people to get involved in communities so that their voice factually means more when it comes to how the platform adapts over time.
Finally, to touch on the open source aspect, I can't really say a whole lot about that but I can certainly say that the company is looking into ways to improve the approach to open source. I suspect that the attitude to FOSS will change under Carlos, given his very positive attitude toward respecting the users and their freedoms. The team is very small (comparative to big tech) and is trying its best to overhaul the experience with a fraction of the budget of big tech, so it will definitely take some time for things to change over time, but he's already making noticeable waves for those who use the platform a lot.
All that being said (I know, it's a lot), I hope I was able to answer your questions and at least give you some context for why I'm proud to be an Ambassador! Feel free to shoot some more questions my way, if you have any, and I'm happy to further discuss the above as well.
