yeah, I had a similar thought about curators, but in my mind, if the curators own a single self-contained platform, they will inevitably become corrupt. so if that's true, let there be many instances and individuals can choose what to trust.

I think a platform like this would be very different from lemmy or something because instances/communities/whatever would be internally incentivized to keep the quality of reviews high for their own sake (which others could benefit from too). maybe that manifests as heavily controlling sign ups or new members are able to post reviews but need to be approved in some way to have their reviews included in the overall instance stats. just spit balling, but I think mechanics that assist that will be very important.

being open source does guard the code, but I think the far more important part is the running platform and its data. I imagine any platform like this will want to own all of its data, so anyone setting up a new deploy would completely start from scratch. if nothing else, people would have to recreate their accounts and attempt to recreate their data. and if past attempts to get people to switch platforms is any indication, I think that would be very difficult.