A model for a serious community-run platform?

I’m working as part of a team that has been building out a free-speech and privacy-focused social networking and video distribution platform (we were working on this before all this Facebook scandal stuff). We originally wanted to find some way to have the running platform itself become a community-owned, community-operated entity. But we ultimately chose not to go this route just yet, as it becomes much harder to guarantee privacy if anyone from the community can have access to the platform with all the user data on it. It seems this reality forces one to form an organization and have employees bound to certain contracts. We haven't found a solution to this problem, other than potentially a heavily encryption-focused IPFS-based service (which we also have done some research on). Overall, there don’t seem to be many models of community-run platforms operating on a serious level out there. Does anyone know of any novel solutions to this problem?