Hear me out.
SomethingAwful forums are notoriously “human,” because they charge $10 for a user account. They don’t have problems with spam/scam/shenanigans that exist on platforms where accounts are free.
Fediverse instances are not currently monetizable - and they should stay that way. But there are still costs to operating one, especially if it’s very popular.
Instance admins charging a minimal fee to register a user account would address both of those concerns, especially the former, especially in light of how the Nicole thing has taken a horribly dark turn.
Minimizing malicious content and vote manpulation is worth it. I get that it would have to be a widely implemented “standard” to be truly effective, but with enough buy-in (pun intended), it would also be easy for admins to defed from instances that have free open registration.
In this scenario, the closed instances die and the open instances do not.
https://gui.fediseer.com/ is already a thing