Two major governance aspects here are totally unrelated to each other in terms of execution; layer 1 and layer 2's. On a scaled layer 1 that is censorship resistant, you can then build layer 2 apps with various governance models. The key point is, on layer 2, you no longer need to worry about censorship resistance of the base layer, IE your metadata (account, community list, etc.), and most importantly, your token balance. The hardest part of layer 1 is getting it both scaled and censorship-resistant. That's why it's good to keep layer 1's as simple and stripped down as possible, so they execute correctly.

Layer 2s are free to be centralized or censorship-resistant in their own ways. For instance, let's say you want a tribe and front end where no one person has the power to kick another; it had to be a community decision. You see, this has nothing to do with token balance as that is safe on Hive, but these tribes are akin to a company almost, and one can have a board of directors as an example to help "decentralize" decision making.

I quote decentralize because that is never the goal. You don't just want decentralization for the sake of it; just as you don't want fire just for the sake of it, each has a purpose and a limit to the extent of its usefulness. Fire in the fireplace works great; on the living room floor, not so much. You want decentralization up to the point of censorship resistance and not an inch more. And for layer 2, you can be much more flexible and add centralized convenience points where needed. As you're aware, layer 2's can be centralized. However, it's a free market, and if one is too heavy-handed, the account ownership model makes switching layer2s a breeze. The free market is what gives you your censorship resistance from being banned on any one front end, as they will simply go out of business or be irrelevant if they try to control something they can't.

Just because my ears perk anytime I hear governance talks, esp DPOS, I'll throw this here. PoW, PoS, DPOS are the major 3 ways humans have found to do blockchain governance. PoW being by far the most unique of the 3 and DPoS being the most established (humans have been voting with their stake for a long time)

However, what happens is they all end up similar to DPoS, which means they were be fewer "supernodes" that run the network. The idea of everyone running their own miner or node is just not going to happen, and I've confident enough o write that off in practice to focus on the inevitable outcome of fewer nodes. The reason power consolidates is because that is just the natural flow of things. Humans have always had hierarchy; it's just how it is. DPoS at least forces you to have 20 nodes, whereas, in PoW/PoS, you'll have a handful. You'll find that the free market prefers a much more centralized approach when it comes to governance, and DPoS ads a layer where it protects the free market from itself via parameters. Satoshi protected the free market from itself with the 1MB cap block (he implemented it as a protective measure vs. lethal spam attacks at the time), but the free market never removed it because it knows the free market would bloat the blocks for a faster experience and thus centralize the chain due to heavy nodes. So in practice, humans have been voting with their stake since we had seashells, back then stake being strength and honor; nowadays, it's money. So DPoS is just giving the free market what it wants in a better package instead of trying to "look the part" with thousands of useless nodes with a handful control 90%+ of the hash rate/tokens.