> Next, identity. If grandpa can post, so can the bots Yes, protection against a million fake accounts is the key scientific problem to solve (Sybil attack).

> Next, identity. If grandpa can post, so can the bots Yes, protection against a million fake accounts is the key scientific problem to solve (Sybil attack). Our university lab has worked on this problem for 15+ years, its hard. Early indications are that ActivityPub and federation are not going to scale. Bot attacks are too ferocious for amateur admins. Big instances attract more people, however a single instance fails to scale. Nobody knows how to build trustworthy self-organising systems with "self-governance". Somehow you need to deduce the reputation of others from their signed interaction history. Their privacy needs to be protected, but you can still calculate a reputation score. After 20 years of scientific progress around "distributed reputation systems" with 100+ scientific articles they have one thing in commons: they don't protect from the Sybil attack. Server federation is not going to help if there is no trust fabric to build upon. The effortless onboarding plus mobile-first requirement of today means you even need to have smartphones talking to eachother directly, P2P-style. <plug> thankfully students in our lab now have carrier-grade NAT traversal operational between Android devices. Google: "Technology Stack for Decentralized Mobile Services" (quotes required).