Bootstrapping will be a big problem. A community that already has some size can potentially start adding an identity-checking step, but if you want to start a new community with confidence that you don't have it full of unaligned bots, it's going to be a lot harder.
Once the community gets going, though, well, we have experience with that. The web used to have a lot of actual communities, where you might know someone for 10 years and perhaps meet up for picnics or something. Larger sites took a huge chunk out of them, and there's actually some disadvantage to the Internet being completely geography-agnostic... it's hard to meet up with my community of 50 people spread more-or-less evenly across the world, or even the US. But they have existed before and they may exist again. I said it won't be all good in my original post, but it won't be all bad either. Some of what is going to be excluded in the botpocalypse is the worst of what exists today. Of course, there's going to be all kinds of incentives to create new pathologies, so who knows which way it will go in the end.
Once the community gets going, though, well, we have experience with that. The web used to have a lot of actual communities, where you might know someone for 10 years and perhaps meet up for picnics or something. Larger sites took a huge chunk out of them, and there's actually some disadvantage to the Internet being completely geography-agnostic... it's hard to meet up with my community of 50 people spread more-or-less evenly across the world, or even the US. But they have existed before and they may exist again. I said it won't be all good in my original post, but it won't be all bad either. Some of what is going to be excluded in the botpocalypse is the worst of what exists today. Of course, there's going to be all kinds of incentives to create new pathologies, so who knows which way it will go in the end.