In an ideal/fantasy world under "small internet theory", every online friend group would have their own Discourse server set up (similar to how friend groups use Discord now), and traffic/usage of that Discourse server is so small that it would be a waste of resources to try to swamp it with bot traffic, and on top of that, everyone on the Discourse server are friends who can vouch for new members who join, so no bot could join the Discourse server because no one would know who they are.
I understand that some may feel we are losing something, by not being able to go onto a website and anonymously talk to 1000s of other anonymous people we do not know, but I do not think that has actually been a net positive and this bot issue demonstrates the issue quite well: if you do not know who you are talking to, you do not know if they are telling the truth, or if they are someone you should even listen to at all, and now they might not even be human. So why do it? I would rather talk to my friends, people I've met in meatspace or over voice chat in a game, people who I can vouch for and that I know I can respect and trust.
Let's build small communities of real friends who recognize each other and spend time with them on the internet, in that way the internet will never die.
And 10 minutes later Texas demands you identify all your users age when someone posts a porn image somewhere. Facebook will gleefully laugh all the way to the court saying we need such internet ID to entrench themselves.
>, in that way the internet will never die.
You mean in the exact way the internet used to be... then died?
I'm guessing your GenX or a Xennial, it's how we think. Relationships and friendships are hard things to acquire and keep and you have to work to do it otherwise friends disappear. The thing is the younger generations mostly don't think that way. They have mostly always lived in a world where connections are cheap and easy to maintain. Attempting to move to a system that is more difficult will be very difficult for them.
So I’m a member of a group of about 70 middle-aged guys who have a discord server exactly like this. We live all over the country, but most of us have met in person, we travel the world together, and we do an annual retreat where usually about half of us meet up. In addition to discord, we have a bunch of groups on Marco Polo, and we have little sub-groups that do zoom calls regularly. Really wish some of them lived nearby, but in spite of that it’s been one of the best things in my life for years now.
It would be interesting if we had some sort of local verification in the real world. As in picking up some key from some physical place or having it sent to some physical place. Some services like nextdoor are set up like this and mail out account auth to make sure the user is local to their next door group. Obviously you can imagine how it might be abused but it is impossible to do so at the scale you can abuse digital only methods.
Small internet isn't very attractive for most bots. Also, I use websites that are invite-only. This is effectively a web of trust. This works pretty well, bots aren't a real problem there.
Run your site like an old school BBS. You only run into these problems when you invite the world to your site and want big numbers. You don't have to do that.
That is a simple method in phpBB. Using ranks one can set new accounts to be able to post and nobody can see their message until verified by a moderator. For small groups and semi-private (invite only) forums this is fairly easy to manage. Spammers and grifters influence nobody. Only cranky old bastards like me see the message. There are other means to keep bots off a tiny site but that is a longer topic. Even better one can send a header to redirect those using the Torbrowser to the Tor link and when states come along and demand some third party process, one simply disables the Clear-Web access. More friction, less data leakage and no corporate capture. This also eliminates the people that can't handle an extra step to access the site and eliminates lazy governments that need money trails.
I understand that some may feel we are losing something, by not being able to go onto a website and anonymously talk to 1000s of other anonymous people we do not know, but I do not think that has actually been a net positive and this bot issue demonstrates the issue quite well: if you do not know who you are talking to, you do not know if they are telling the truth, or if they are someone you should even listen to at all, and now they might not even be human. So why do it? I would rather talk to my friends, people I've met in meatspace or over voice chat in a game, people who I can vouch for and that I know I can respect and trust.
Let's build small communities of real friends who recognize each other and spend time with them on the internet, in that way the internet will never die.