> A “friend request” mechanism is one way of achieving this.

But then you’re left dealing with spam “friend requests”, which is still something I have to take action on, filter out, or ignore — same as spam email.

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JimDabell 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Having a trustworthy inbox that contains only legitimate email and a separate friend request queue where you can decide “do I know this person / organisation?” is far better than having a single inbox that’s a vast ocean of emails of unknown provenance you have to make a trust decision for for every single email.

	▲	inigyou 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can do this with email today. Heck, you could do it in 2001, I remember. Hotmail's "exclusive" spam filter policy where anything not from your contacts goes to spam, where you can decide if you want to add them as a contact or not.