I mean, fundamentally, yeah.

But we live in a corporate controlled, corrupt, world and now of these larger companies can be trusted with this process.

Some smaller communities and platforms DO this right sometimes, as they build in house processu that respect privacy. But governments world wide are making this impossible through increasingly strict compliance requirements that actually increase data privacy risks and funnel these needs to 3rd party services who just lie about what they do with the data.

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I'm not kidding when I say this is a REAL BIG PROBLEM.

bot based traffic and astroturfing will supplement and replace human communication on platforms like Lemmy. Driving the narrative and how we engage to the whims of a few rich people. Bots are relatively cheap, and easy to deploy at scale across many platforms.

There will be no open corner of the internet safe from manipulation and forced division. More people will be forced into walled gardens from corps that implement human verification, as they are the only ones with the resources to do something (While also being the source of the problem, see how that works?)

How do you carve out spaces that are protected from that? Well, you need to determine who's a bot, and who's and actual person.

But we can't do that, so the alternative is we are ran over by bots and astroturfing till we're at each other's throats like good culture war puppets.

The future is bleak....