it could and did happen. I remember reading about 6 year old kid getting lost at the airport gate (i think it was in germany) only to be discovered when they finally looked for their parents in italy. just went away while parents were preoccupied with something else and looked like someone else's kid while boarding the plane. as a parent travelling with small kid I can totally see that happening anywhere - kids can just walk anywhere with no questions asked as long as they are next to an adult who looks like they could be their parent.

that is an interesting idea. still... you can create an account (or have a troll farm of such accounts) that will mainly be used to trust bots and when their reputation goes down you throw them away and create new ones. same as you would do with traditional troll accounts... you made it one step more complicated but since the cost of creating bot accounts is essentially zero it doesn't help much.

you are right - it doesn't have to be one or the other... I just assume that for social media to work as I expect I don't know most of the people on the platform. given that assumption and the lowering price of creating bots and ability to onboard them I expect that eventually most of the actors on the platform will end up being bots. people that write them are often insanely motivated (politically or financially) and creating barriers for them is not easy.

I was thinking about something like this but I think it's ultimately not enough. You have essentially just two possible ends stages for this:

1. you only trust people that you personally meet and you verified their private key directly and then you will see only posts/interactions from like 15 people. the social media looses its meaning and you can just have a chat group on signal.

2. you allow some length of chains (you trust people [that are trusted by the people]^n that you know) but if you include enough people for social media to make sense then you will eventually end up with someone poisoning your network by trusting a bot (which can trust other bots...) so that wouldn't work unless you keep doing moderation similar as now.

i would be willing to buy a wearable physical device (like a yubikey) that could be connected to my computer via a bluetooth interface and act as a fido2 second factor needed for every post but instead of having just a button (like on the yubikey) it would only work if monitoring of my heat rate or brainwaves would check out.

but there is just no right or wrong answer to every question... sometimes it's just about opinion.

sometimes these questions are trivial (which color of tie should I wear with this shirt) and sometimes they are literally life and death questions (should death penalty be legal)... and there will always be people with opposing opinions on them. "agreeing to disagree" is literally the best possible thing they can do to live in the same society.

ceo is literally the only job that can be fully replaced by the "ai" at the moment with no loss of performance whatsoever

Why do you think lower paid CEO must be shitty? There turns out to be very little link between the CEO and CEO pay and the company performance... they are only paid a lot cause they are in the position of power to directly influence their salary.

All good advice. I'd recommended protonmail for mail hosting - got very good experience with them and the onky downside is you have to use their client.

I tried both hosting my own mail server and using a paid mail hosting with my own domain and I advise against the former.

The reason not to roll out your own mail server is that your email might go to spam at many many common mail services. Servers and domains that don't usually send out big amount of email are considered suspicious by spam filters and the process of letting other mail servers know that they are there by sending out emails is called warming them up. It's hard and it takes time... Also, why would you think you can do hosting better than a professional that is paid for that? Let someone else handle that.

With your own domain you are also not bound to one provider - you can change both domain registrar and your email hosting later without changing your email address.

Also, avoid using something too unusual. I went with firstname@lastname.email cause I thought it couldn't be simpler than that. Bad idea... and I can't count how many times people send mail to a wrong address because such tld is unfamiliar. I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause "that couldn't be right"...

They pulled similar shit on Belarus-Polish border. Flew couple thousands people from Iraq promising them asylum in the EU, then walked them across the fence and closed the gates behind them. When Poland refused to let them in and some people froze in the fields in between border crossing it made Poland look like monsters in the media rather than Lukaschenko, so it worked like a charm.

Edge is not the default in work environments. My old company was a MS shop and they still were forcing everyone to use Chrome because - of all things - MS Dynamics 365 web interface was buggy in other browsers (including Edge)...