Not a large fee. Just something like the local equivalent of $10 USD.
The deposit sits in escrow during a probationary period while the new account holder has to prove they’re here with good intentions. If the account starts spamming, advertising, trolling, or plugging their slop-coded garbage, they get banned and forfeit the deposit to the instance they signed up with. If they interact in good faith for the “probationary” period without showing signs of being an LLM bot / gaming the system / “karma farming”, the deposit gets refunded in full and they exit the probationary period.
If they don’t interact enough to prove their intentions here a good, the deposit still gets refunded in full but the account gets banned.
This would virtually eliminate drive-by spam and trolls while also funding instances and encouraging positive engagement.
Is it feasible? Probably not. Is this an idea likely to be popular? Nope, otherwise I wouldn’t be posting it here. Do I think this is a good idea? Yep.
You could try this as a funding model for a particular instance, which is maybe potentially viable if you actually offered some kind of extremely high quality content or moderation…
But it wouldn’t stop drive by shitposts and trolls.
Unless you made the instance insular, self contained, not federated with any body.
If you are federated to any other instance… well they can now access all your stuff without the paywall.
Strictly speaking, you can spin up basically a private forum/webzone, but your ‘business model’ here makes basically no sense unless it is totally exclusive.
Users pay a monthly fee to an ISP. It is the ISP who should be distributing the resources to the attached entities out there, as they are making profit hand over fist, regardless of the infrastructure involved. Without websites, ISP’s are nothing.
Enjoy the 5 users who are going to do that.
Lowtax blew his brains out in his car with a failed legacy of doing exactly this.
dont think it will work, it will just force people back to reddit, its only useful if you are providng “premium content”
It seems like a pretty horrible approach, not gonna lie.
- Not everyone can pay that money, even if it’s a small amount
- It immediately eliminates privacy / relative anonynity
- The hell with financial processing and bureaucracy
- Dependency on 3rd-party payment processors + notarization by them (no way in hell they’ll allow fedinsfw.app)
- It doesn’t work in the open architecture and protocols like activity pub
- It doesn’t solve neither bots nor propaganda problem
- It immediately makes Fediverse unappealing to anyone who just considers moving away from big platforms (aka “why do I have to pay to these nonames?”)
- Who are the judges? What prevents malicious instances from just stealing people’s money?
it will drive people back to reddit or other forums which were bad before.
You can’t employ any measures like this on what is a fully open network by design.
Someone can set up an instance that doesn’t do this the same day any organised effort to do this takes place
And honestly, for someone who gets a kick out of being a pain in the ass, $10 isn’t going to stop anyone remotely determined.
Still get the benefit of the determined people funding the instances they’re using.
Going by my gut, so happy to be told how I’m wrong, but the majority of (well meaning) users that come to Lemmy aren’t going to drop $10 to see what it’s about, even if there’s a promise they’ll get it back again.
Hell the reason Lemmy.world is the biggest instance is because most of the other instances asked a question before allowing you to sign up. I couldn’t be arsed with that when I was just arriving to see what it was all about, so that’s why I’m on this instance and still on it because I can’t be arsed moving.
Added friction on the web generally ends up discouraging the users you want and does very little to put off the users you don’t
They can browse for free to see what it’s about. That’s how ArsTechnica works, and I’ve been a subscriber there for 10+ years.
Sometimes a little bit of friction and slight gatekeeping is a good thing. As my massive block list can attest, not everyone who signs up here makes the fediverse a better place.
Ars technica would have the same amount of content even if there were 99% fewer users, user comments aren’t why people visit. At least I don’t think I’ve ever read them and I’ve been reading it for around 2 decades, the users are irrelevant to the main purpose of the site.
The same is not remotely true of the fediverse. The quantity and quality of the content is directly related to the volume of users
I agree with all of this.
I don’t think I even realized that ars technica had a comments section until now.
On here, I comment pretty frequently, but rarely if I would be the first commenter on a post. I will often read an article I’m not that interested in here if there’s an active discussion in the comments, and I regularly seek out ask_[blank]_ type communities to read through posts with a lot of comments.
I think the better idea would be nano payments for every resource used including moderation fee. Neither server resources are free nor is the moderation time. And lemmy has no ads.
Users should pay their fair share for resources they use, and suddenly spam wouldn’t be a problem, scraping wouldn’t be a problem, and mods would get paid for their work
A good idea if your want to make sure this place is empty 🤣
It’s an unpopular opinion because it is an objectively terrible idea.
Just create your own safespace where you can ban everyone you want. You can do all the government ID checks you want and if you want to charge money just charge it.
This capital-fascist dog whistle is weak sauce suck my dick you coward.
Ah yes, the Something Awful approach (kind of). Getting money/financial services involved bring a whole new set of problems and legal scrutiny.
If you were going to do this, I think the only way to make it work would be some sort of blockchain based crypto system.
You create your fediverse account and then also some sort of blockchain transaction that consumes some nominal amount of cryptocurrency. Then each of your posts gets a signature which authenticates it against that original transaction.
That said, this is a horrible idea and we shouldn’t do it. It would absolutely solve a lot of spam problems, at the cost of making fediverse participation out of reach for an awful lot of the world’s population. Unless we make it cheap enough for them, in which case it is also cheap enough that those in developed countries can create dozens or hundreds of accounts without concern for cost.
Yay! More power to the rich!
/s
This is very similar to what metafilter does, you have to buy an account to participate. People with skin in the game act better. You don’t get it refunded. But I think philosophically this is similar and we can take lessons from it. I think it’s valuable
