EDIT: I know many people have a knee-jerk aversion to anything crypto, but this is not a scheme to make money. I would be happy to see this done with fiat as well, but IMO this is much easier to do with smart contracts.
I am very excited about the possibility of the Fediverse, and the potential for many experiments in instance governance. A problem that all instances must content with is trolling and spam. It seems very difficult to impose a cost on these bad actors without harming honest users as well. Either instances have minimal signup friction and are vulnerable to being overwhelmed with bad actors & defederated (see the recent defederation decision from Beehaw), or they present frustrating barriers such as manual approval or waitlists for folks who just want to have fun
A possible solution comes from the blockchain space, which has been dealing with anonymous bad actors since its inception. Many blockchains and blockchain apps require users to stake some asset in order to gain certain privileges (basically a deposit). If the user is determined to be a bad actor, they lose some or all of their stake.
An instance could be integrated with a smart contract to manage membership could be very effective at dissuading trolls and spammers. A user could stake a small amount of money (say $10) in order to create an account on the instance. This could be done very quickly and would require no manual approval from admins. If the admins determine they are acting poorly, they could ban the user and slash their funds. If an honest user decides they don’t want to stay on the instance, they could delete their account and recover their deposit.
(EDIT: An important part of this is that the funds are destroyed when slashed, not given to the admins or mods. This prevents a profit incentive to ban)
I’ve got a prototype smart contract for this. Would be interested in working with someone on this if there’s anyone with experience with the instance management
Fuck that. Keep cryptoshit out of this
Yeah, that seems like it would have too much perverse incentive for admins to ban users they don’t like, both to remove them and get money for doing so.
Should have clarified that the funds are destroyed, not given to admins, to prevent this bad incentive. I’ve edited now
It seems very difficult to impose a cost on these bad actors without harming honest users as well.
A user could stake a small amount of money (say $10) in order to create an account on the instance.
Aren’t you suggesting putting a literal cost on honest users?
They can reclaim the cost if they leave the server. Spammers/trolls cannot, so will lose $10 each time they create an account
It’s just an idea
Some instances already have approval only registration. I think that’s more than enough.
For an accessible platform such as Lemmy, Kbin (or even Reddit), the registration for new users has to be as easy as possible. Introducing cryptocurrencies won’t make the cut if we want to reduce spam.
The only reasonable way currently to approach spam is to have basic bots (like automod on Reddit) and add to that the report feature used by users and mods. Getting this working reliably on fediverse is first priority now.
I think cryptos can be useful in the fediverse. We could use either Patreon type or crpyto type donations to compensate moderators and instance maintainers. This wasn’t possible with Reddit due to their ToS. IMO this is the more reasonable use of crypto here.
I’m concerned that if the fediverse scales up, this will not be enough. Especially with tools like LLMs allowing more sophisticated botting. There needs to be some sybil resistance mechanism
I definitely agree crypto could work in a diminished capacity at the absolute most. I’m thinking like having an option to donate monero anonymously as a way to support an instance or even a specific community. That’s pretty much it for me. I would fear the day that BitBoy Crypto lays his grubby little fingers on this site and all of the NFT scammers and Crypto Br0s follow suit. At that point I’m out.
I had a similar thought I’ve been mulling with giving each server their own unique currency that would function like server “equity.” Voting on moderation, federation, etc could be handled through it.
If a server elects to, they could ask users to “buy in” to a server at registration. This could help cover hosting costs while still giving the user something.
Yeah, there’s a lot of experiments in the web3 space around this kind of thing. Most of them are dumpster fires, but there are lessons to be learned from the successful projects