> Libertarian solutions, as you propose, are no more idealistic than mine, but I don’t put my faith in them because ultimately we are social beings.
Libertarianism is not opposed to organizations, it's opposed to coercion. If you want to get together with ten million of your closest friends and create your own not for profit Facebook to be run in the public interest, libertarians would not stand in your way unless you try to force everyone to use it or pay for it etc.
That means if you want to build something you have to convince people to support it, and not everyone will. But that stands in the way of what you want to do no more than saying that the US can't fund development of the internet without people in China paying US taxes.
You don't need everyone, you just need enough people to exceed the price of doing what you want to do. If you can convince the majority of Americans (> My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate.
This is the fundamental problem with all of it. It's the same reason they can't self-beneficially participate in the political process -- no time to become informed, so too easy to make self-harming decisions. And then you get heuristics like "always vote for X party instead of Z party" that most certainly do not actually fix it.
Maybe the solution is greater specialization. Instead of everyone funding everything and then having neither meaningful control nor understanding of any of it, have different people choose what they care about. A million people decide they want to support cancer research, and so they spend real time figuring out who is doing the best work and then give all of what would've been their tax dollars to that. A different million people decide they want to support development of communications technology, so they take the time to understand how communications technology works, and they're the ones to support that with their time or money.
In principle the amount of funding that goes to each thing is the same as it would be if everyone is funding everything, but instead of 100M people each paying $1 to a hundred things, you have a million people each paying $100 to one thing and a different million people each paying $100 for another and so on. And then it becomes self-balancing, because if a problem gets worse, more people start paying attention to and caring about solving it.
And don't say nobody would do it, or explain why a government would fund research instead of letting some other government do it. People do it because they want to live in the world where it happens. Or they don't, but then why would they vote for it either?