Hahaha

Which public funds ? DNS0.eu was a private initiative, from the NextDNS founders. DNS4EU is a public initiative, as mentioned in the news, and this one is still supported and actively developed.

DNS0 was launched at a time when no other EU public DNS resolver was available. Today, you have DNS4EU that is actively funded and pushed throughout the EU administration (and critical infrastructures), so I believe that the DNS0/NextDNS founders saw that there was very little differenciating factors to their proposal, and decided to shut it down.

Had they "captured" a larger marketshare in the EU while they were ahead, situation might have been different today, but in my opinion it never happened.

Probably something like the NTP pool [1] model could work but I can also see people abusing that by adding nodes that rewrite zones or specific records to MitM people. I only mention this model because it scales very well and people can contribute resources they can afford but they can also withdraw from the pool without harming the community [2] in regards to funding resources at least. Some type of automation would have to continuously validate each pool member and use a unique assigned NSID or id.server that maps to an operator account.

Each person just runs a node with a specific Unbound [3] configuration and pulls filter lists from community approved repositories. I mention Unbound as it is one of the most flexible and powerful recursive DNS options and many here are already using it. Bootstrapping could come from a static updated file in a repository that gets refreshed via cron.

[1] - https://www.ntppool.org/en/

[2] - https://community.ntppool.org/c/server-operators/6

[3] - https://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/