Depends on the watermark method used. Some people talk about watermarking by subtly adjusting the words used. Like if there’s 5 synonyms and you pick the 1st synonym, next word you pick the 3rd synonym. To check the watermark you have to access to the model and probabilities to see if it matches that. The tricky part about this is that the model can change and so can the probabilities and other things I don’t fully understand.

Was that anything more than just rumors? Letting a currently monopolistic company keep the browser because another bad billionaire might buy it and do something bad with it just prevents anything from changing.

Who organized this form? Is there something official to make it look like it’s not just signing me up for spam?

My prediction is that manually reviewing user creation won’t scale to a high level and unless systems develop spam detection and reputation management similar to email then it’s not going to be limited to just one or two bad instances.

Its trivial to create my own instance with a new domain and there’s no limitations against sending ActivityPub messages to a server. Unfortunately the simplest fix is for big instances to restrict what instances can communicate to it, but that causes centralization.

Plus, we don’t need to be huge. There’s no benefit from it.

The benefit is breadth and depth of communities. Reddit is great because if you are interested in a topic, there’s a bunch of people talking about it.