PrinzKasper

I think it should be more akin to something like email. There is no one entity that controls all emails. It’s lots of independant servers and clients able to communicate with each other.

If its open-source, couldn’t somebody just fork it and remove the login requirement?

Shadow Banning is very useful for spam bots. If you let them know they’re banned, they’ll just open a new account. But if YouTube keeps accepting their comments with a smile on its face before immediately tossing those comments into the shredder, it’ll take some time before the bot figures out what’s going on.