I am genuinely interested to see how that case study turns out and find out more.  (Im not being sarcastic)

Just wanted to mention too that some truly decentralized forums already exist - Freenet's been around for over a decade or so, for example.  But it is still sucks big time to actually use.  and hardly anyone actually bothers with it anyway.  People just dont want taking responsibility for moderating stuff themselves.  And you need a ton more bandwidth and drive space compared to regular old client-server setups.  So Id definitely be curious to check out your ideas for a more user-friendly, lightweight version that doesnt dump so much on the end user.