Raids in rural areas

With a 5 minute time limit I think 2 or 3 players could do it. Solo will be incredibly difficult but I'll probably still try if nobody is around to help

I share your concern. And to add another worry: I wonder if there will even be raids in rural areas. I'm not clear (no one is yet, I think) on how frequent and geographically diverse the raids will be.

I doubt that raids will be happening in rural areas very often. Traffic monitoring will put the raids in areas where the most people play.
The gym closest to my house is a historical marker, and it is along a busy country road. It's not a stagnant gym because no one wants to take it down, it's stagnant because it is very unaccessible. This gym will never host a raid, because no one can really get to it easily.

Yes and no. Not going to worry too much until all the details are out, but yes I'm in the same situation as you. Could be frustrating.

I hate to jump to conclusions but if the spoofers/botters aren't removed I think this may be the end of non cheater Pokemon in my town.

They already hold 23 of 25 gyms and you cannot take them down to hold them. We have managed to defend 2 gyms among the other two teams but mostly because the spoofers let us. Now that rewards will be tied to gyms being held by a certain team when it goes down I doubt we will get to keep those two anymore either. And now I bet bots will be tossing berries at the mons in the gyms constantly now so it will be interesting to see if I can even take down opposing botter gyms anymore.

So the raids will be a limit of 20 folks. How do you beat cheaters to this? They will just spoof to it. I cannot see an angle where I get any rewards from this change as it looks now. Maybe the actual release will address this though. Maybe it will be groups of 20 but multiple groups allowed?

So far I have:

Gym shavers demotivating the last mon only then jumping in exacerbated by fewer spots overall.

Scanners being built to monitor countdowns for spoofer raids.

Premium passes for one a day use...that you can just buy so no real limiting factor. Plus spoofers can let others know if the Poke to be battled is worth the pass or not, maybe.

Having to manually feed any mon I might have in a gym. Why?

Bots can feed all mons in a gym not just theirs.

It could be pretty difficult to successfully participate in a raid. First, you need to pick wisely your boss of the day (if multiple times a day) and then hope that once you joined, someone else will be there at all.