I agree. And defending against bots will be difficult. But not impossible. Trust exists in real life. It can exist online. The solution to establishing trust in real life changes with scale, but the highest level, there is democracy. It works on millions of people. The fediverse can try to find a new solution, but it may be easier and faster just to replicate democracy online. This includes many of the tasks a real democracy has to undergo, like:

• photo IDs
• municipal, provincial, and federal elections
• supreme courts, regular courts, judges, laws, and punishments
• public news service

At this point, paid full-time civil servants are required. They can’t just be volunteers! How are they paid? Uhoh, now we need taxes.

After all that, it is probably easier to just piggyback on the trust established by existing democracies, requiring a valid photo ID from a functioning democracy in order to sign up. I think that is a pretty good solution. However, no democracy in the world has an official online service in place that web servers could use to reliably validate such government photo IDs. So unfortunately, this solution is impossible for now.

IDK, what solutions do you have?