The days of an open web are long gone. Every server will eventually have to require authentication for access, and to get an account you will have to provide some form of payment or social proof.
Honestly, I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing.
Honestly, I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing.
I mean, at Communick I offer Matrix, Mastodon, Funkwhale and Lemmy accounts only for paying customers. As such, I have implemented payments via Stripe for convenience, but that didn't stop from getting customers who wanted to pay directly via crypto, SEPA and even cash. It also didn't stop me from bypassing the whole system and giving my friends and family an account directly.
Why would any third party rely on authentication based on the relationship between my service and my customers?
Sounds like sanctioned racism.
I'm talking about social proof as in "You are an student of the city university, so you get an account at the library", "Julie from the book reading group wanted an account at our Bookwyrm server, so I made an account for her" or even "Unnamed customer who signed up for Cingular Wireless and was given an authorization code to access Level 2 support directly".
You are taking one thing I said (service providers will require some form of payment or social proof to give credentials to people who want to access the service), assumed the worst possible interpretation (people will only implement the worst possible forms of social proofing), and to top it off you added something else (gatekeeping) entirely on your own.
I can not dictate how you interpret my comment, but maybe could you be a bit more charitable and assume positive intent when talking with people you never met?