zlacker

Perhaps. Email, IRC, USENET and the phone system are or were all decentralized social networks. They did fine in their heydey.

If you're a 2023-web purist who's willing to just avoid whole services because they're not on your preferred platform, then hw-backed web RA would make no difference to you even if it could be implemented (which IMO it can't): you'd avoid the services that use it just like you already do today.

>>mike_h+(OP)
This is not realistic outlook. If such systems are present, I would see additional hurdles along the way, just we see by Cloudflare if your requests aren't of the usual kind. This does make web discoverability much worse.

It is simply the wrong approach to focus on the negative, in this case spam or in general hostile bots.