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
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
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?
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.
No.
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.
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.
