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.

  • lemmysmash@piefed.socialEnglish
    28·
    2 days ago

    It seems like a pretty horrible approach, not gonna lie.

    1. Not everyone can pay that money, even if it’s a small amount
    2. It immediately eliminates privacy / relative anonynity
    3. The hell with financial processing and bureaucracy
    4. Dependency on 3rd-party payment processors + notarization by them (no way in hell they’ll allow fedinsfw.app)
    5. It doesn’t work in the open architecture and protocols like activity pub
    6. It doesn’t solve neither bots nor propaganda problem
    7. 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?”)
    8. Who are the judges? What prevents malicious instances from just stealing people’s money?