Funnily enough, I was just talking about this with someone a few days ago. I've definitely retreated into my fair share of dark forests to escape the spam, bots, and astroturfing. I do wonder if the Fediverse gets popular enough, if we'll have to retreat into a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances. It definitely feels like anything that's open and accessible (and anonymous) is just asking to get turned into a steaming dumpsterfire at this point.
if we’ll have to retreat into a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances
That does not sound bad.
I wonder, what will happen to mainstream platforms.
If you talk to "regular" people without our background, they often enough don't believe that even astroturfing exists, especially not on "their" platform. So there will inevitably be a large amount of people who are oblivious to the fact, that they're talking to machines and feel like this is the real world. That's scary.
There will probably be mounting pressure to deanonymize the internet, like with what we're seeing via age verification legislation in various places.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev to 
Funnily enough, I was just talking about this with someone a few days ago. I've definitely retreated into my fair share of dark forests to escape the spam, bots, and astroturfing. I do wonder if the Fediverse gets popular enough, if we'll have to retreat into a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances. It definitely feels like anything that's open and accessible (and anonymous) is just asking to get turned into a steaming dumpsterfire at this point.
That does not sound bad.
I wonder, what will happen to mainstream platforms.
If you talk to "regular" people without our background, they often enough don't believe that even astroturfing exists, especially not on "their" platform. So there will inevitably be a large amount of people who are oblivious to the fact, that they're talking to machines and feel like this is the real world. That's scary.
There will probably be mounting pressure to deanonymize the internet, like with what we're seeing via age verification legislation in various places.