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.
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.