The mechanics of how a public social media product would work have been fairly well figured out by now: It would be a digital platform that allows people to post and share a variety of media — pictures, audio, video, text — to other people in the network. I personally would structure it a little more like Instagram or Tumblr, where I was one of the early employees, than Twitter or Facebook. In other words, it should be built to prioritize sharing things you love over getting attention by simply being loud online.

The harder, more interesting part is the corporate structure. Instead of being run, as all these platforms are, are as profit-making entities, public social media would be grounded in its local community. An organization similar to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting could be formed, funded through a mix of government and foundation grants and member donations. And, as with other public media, its board and membership would hold it accountable not for meeting “engagement” metrics, but for how well it serves the public interest and members of its community.

In some ways this structure is very similar to what Facebook once was. TheFacebook started as a platform limited to Harvard students. This restricted access helped behavior on the network: Only people with a verified real-world identity and accountability could get in.

This is not the case today with Facebook, of course, or with any other for-profit social platform that depends on getting as many accounts as possible. A nonprofit model eliminates most of the incentives for bad behavior. The network would not be under pressure from investors to generate growth at all costs. There would be no incentive to allow fake accounts; in fact the incentives would be opposite, since fake accounts impose costs on the network and provide no benefits.

Unlike for-profit social media, public social media would be explicitly noncommercial — no brand accounts allowed. In fact, there would be no accounts for any organizations — this network is for people only. An account on a public media platform would be tied to a real-world, local identity, like a driver’s license or library card. Anonymity online has real benefits, and a user name doesn’t have to be your real name. The public social media network could keep this information hashed, unscrambled only when action against a user is required, which would make it easier to crack down on fake and troll accounts.

Of course, the existential question for any new network is, “Will people use it, and how many?” You might be tempted to point to the huge footprint of the existing networks and say that there’s no room for anyone else, but this has not proven true. Niche networks like Discord and Mastodon have grown up in the shadow of Facebook and Twitter because they provide users with things the bigger networks do not — a safer community, a less noisy space.

There are certainly pitfalls to this model. For instance, what happens if, hypothetically, a public official is abusive on this space? A publicly supported network could face attempted intimidation by politicians who control its funding.