I live in Germany. Here, for example, the government threatens to fine companies who don't censor "hate speech" - with no way to appeal and no exact definitions. So even if you just operate your own node, you might be liable for fines if you don't censor at the whim of the government.

Maybe a decentralized Twitter, with some kind of magic anonymization that is usable for normal people, could work around that. But then I guess decentralized approaches never achieved a good performance so far?

A decentralized alternative seems like the only hope, but it might be very difficult or impossible to implement.