I appreciate your take and the thought put into the reply. I don’t mean to gatekeep the fediverse to keep normies out because that isn’t my desire at all. Merely my stance is while I believe that low engagement is very undesirable, high volume of scammers/spammers are equally undesirable.

I’m also thinking of things from a moderator/instance owner point of view where trying to defend your instance from illegal activity, spam, and harmful content is greatly increased by having open sign ups. If the majority of engagement on your posts are from pussy in bio accounts then that is a put off from the end user as well.

Trolls and assholes will always get through if they are motivated enough, fediverse platforms usually gives the end user enough tools to block them.

Your perspective has a lot of valid points as well, I think that there is a compromise somewhere that is slightly more effective than a simple captcha that could also streamline onboarding and validating users. I don’t know if it’s as easy as you suggest to ban spammers automatically but I’m all ears for hearing solutions. I think the fediverse is especially equipped for cooperation that could make that kind of automoderation more successful than on legacy socials

I don’t want the fediverse to be an exclusive club, I am already annoyed about how things can be an echo chamber even worse than legacy socials here at times. My hope that bridges and utilities will come that help people follow each other from bluesky/mastodon and allow account migrations from either as well.