They’re still cities, but people tend to start calling them “rural” when you get a certain distance from the big cities and things spread out, often also near farmland and/or nature.

For example, this would probably count as rural.

I don’t imagine quitting the internet, but I can picture the internet fracturing into smaller sites with resistance to AI through obscurity - sort of similar to how we DO get occasional spam bots on Lemmy, but it largely isn’t worth bad actors’ time to target this platform.

Either that, or larger platforms with some sort of verification process, but that seems like a losing battle in the long run.