The problem with this is trust. If you could seamlessly migrate like this, there’s nothing to stop someone faking a long post/comment on their own instance, making them look very legitimate and then migrating that account to a trusted/legitimate instance.

Then using that for spam/selling block chain etc.

People are the reason we can’t have nice things.

What would be the point? Reddit doesn’t make any content. They’re just a platform. If they go ahead and paywall subs, those subs are going to have a tiny potential subscriber base. Therefore, they will be less attractive to post to (smaller audience, fewer upvotes etc).

About the only place I can maybe see it working is AskHistorians. And you pay the Historians to answer the questions. Which would of course reduce the amount Reddit takes from the paywall. Doesn’t seem worth it, to me.

Even then, I think the Historians would rather reply in a new free sub with wider readership than take $20 for putting in three hours of work responding to something. They do it because they’re passionate. Not for money.

This works for us:
Step one: Keep your instance civil. No tolerance for horrible people (racists/bigots etc).
Step two: Maintain a vibrant local set of communities free from nastiness.
Step three: Let your users engage with the noise of the fediverse as much or as little as they desire.

We don’t bother with telling our users who or what they can access, and don’t immediately ban visitors based on their home instance. Will that scale to millions of users? Probably not. But that’s a problem for future Nath - maybe.

As I intentionally filter out as much US politics as I can, this has come out of nowhere for me.

Australia has a couple of really simple things baked into its electoral system to resist something wildly unpopular like this from getting in power:

1. Compulsory voting. These MAGA crazies are not and will never be the majority. If everyone had to vote, they’d never get in.
2. Proportional voting. We vote for multiple candidates. If our first choice doesn’t get in, our vote goes to our second choice. Then third etc. we aren’t forced to vote for a lizard just to prevent the worse lizard getting in (it still almost always comes down to two parties, though).

I know these are total non-starters for our American friends. “You can’t make me vote, that’s against the constitution or something”.

Surely the most famous one is the kid trying to enter the school for the gifted, right?