Cringing at the idea that having the government decide what appears on the internet will be some improvement over Facebook and Google doing that.

I don't think it will and you can already see with things such as Article 13 in the EU that this isn't going to work very well.

Neither the government nor the Zuckmeister will defend the interests of the average internet user. They'll defend their own narrow class interests. They both have interests in maintaining their own wealth at the expense of the rest of the population. Government dark patterns won't be better than Facebook ones.

What government can perhaps do is break up the monopolies. Some people then say, but how will Facebook remain viable since its profits depend on massive scaling? I don't want Facebook to remain viable. It shouldn't remain viable.

One idea which is intermediary between what we have now and full p2p or self-hosting would be to run data centers in the public interest on a non-profit basis. Everyone gets their own VPS and can run whatever federated system they want on it. Nobody owns the overall system. This would be less than ideal but better than what exists now.