I’m not sure that flashiness is essential.

I mean, the core functionality of Civitai is a tiled list of images that show up when one specifies search criteria.

Needs to parse the EXIF metadata from a few generative AI systems and display it.

There are animations and endless scrolling and stuff, but the site could function without those.

There’s a forum feature that might be helpful, but not sure that that’s necessary.

IIRC there’s a tagging feature, and that might be.

Not sure that being tied to an actual image generator is necessary. In fact, I’d imagine that if the license on models permits for it, there will be image generation services that will add support for using models hosted on such a service to generate images themselves.

Not sure that being distributed/federated is necessary. Having the models be redistributable elsewhere probably is. That’d let someone set up another site if need be, akin to open-source projects and source repositories.

IIRC there’s a Civitai feature to let users buy early access to models. That might be tough, since there network effect matters — if someone is trying to make money on a model, then the size of the userbase is important, and being smaller than civitai matters. Also introduces payment processing into the mix, and that creates leverage for content restrictions to be imposed.