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
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
I’m making an active effort to approach Lemmy differently than Reddit. If I’m being negative, I won’t comment. If it’s a pointless debate on politics, I won’t join. Positive comments only.
With that in mind, and some breathing techniques, I’ll just say: the day Lemmy becomes in anyway related to cryptocurrencies is the day I’m immediately gone. Thanks for your input.
If the same thing could be accomplished with a traditional payment system, would that change your opinion?
For me? No, and I also speak for the entire Mlem App Dev Team
And who decides what counts as bad behavior worth forfeiting funds? Sounds ripe for corruption.
I would think the admins would make slashing decisions
It’s important that slashed funds are destroyed, not sent to anyone in particular. This ensures there is no way to profit by slashing unfairly. A malevolent admin could decide to start slashing for no reason, but they’d ruin their own server eventually as users left.
There may also be ways to curtail the admin’s slashing power (ex: require 2 or of 3 admins to slash, or limited number of slashes per day) which could also be programmed into the contracts
And even in the worst case where an admin goes rogue and slashes the entire server, you’re just out $10. It’s not the end of the world
If all you’re trying to do is limit bots and trolls, just make your $10 a required donation to help with hosting costs. I’m sorry but this sounds like yet another blockchain solution in search of a problem.
It’s possible that a donation would be sufficient. I have no data on how many users would be willing to put down a deposit and not willing to make a donation
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
Not only do I agree with the comments talking about corruption, but I also just think that would slow fediverse adoption to a crawl. I’m 100% not going to sign up for something that costs money even if I could get it back. It seems like too much of a hassle and potential for losing money. It also seems like it may make it even harder for the less tech literate people to sign up.
Not all instances need to do this. The best part of the fediverse is these experiments can happen without affecting the rest of the system
What’s stopping bad actors from making really cool looking servers, attracting lot’s of people who pay a deposits to join. Then when the time is right. The mods just prune everybody take the deposits for themselves, making out like bandits.
The problem is that the amount that would be too much for the regular user would still be very acceptable for a company’s marketing department or a crypto-phishing operation.
I think that manual approvals or waitlists are still a smaller barrier than getting into crypto and paying money just to join. Also, there is literally no reason not to join one of the smaller instances instead of the big ones.
Crypto has a bad reputation in general because of both how its unregulatedness allows “Big Money” to make it even more its own playground than other markets and also the insane number of rugpull scams going around.
That said if you think this is valuable and some people at least would like it, you’re free to do it, and I actually encourage you to try it. Host your own server, implement your crypto-based auth on top of it, and see if people join.
I may give it a try. For people who have spent much time in the crypto space, I wouldn’t find this a large barrier to entry. But I’ve gotten used to interacting with smart contracts on the web. I can see how anyone who isn’t in that space would be intimidated
There’s no way to give it a try, if only a single instance is asking money for the exact same result, people will use the free ones. You will get zero spam… and probably zero users. And many instances will defederate with what will look like a crypto scam.
lol so powermods could take your money too, no thanks
Should have clarified that the funds are destroyed, not given to admins, to prevent this bad incentive. I’ve edited now
No.
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 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’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
Reddit has scaled up more than 1000x than Lemmy and it does work there. The problem is rather, that the mods aren’t compensated for this. Even some basic compensation rather than 0 would be great.
While Sybil resistance is important, it’s not too important atm. And nothing speaks against using some captcha or so.
The security and trust concerns are much different and less critical here than on Blockchains.
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
