Everyone I have something very important to say about The Agora.
The Problem
Let me be super clear here to something people don’t seem to understand about lemmy and the fediverse. Votes mean absolutely nothing. No less than nothing.
In the fediverse, anyone can open a instance, create as many users as they want and one person can easily vote 10,000 times. I’m serious. This is not hard to do.
Voting at best is a guide to what is entertaining.
As soon as you allow a incentive the vast majority of votes will be fake. They might already be mostly fake.
If you try to make any decision using votes as a guide someone WILL manipulate votes to control YOU.
one solution (think of others too!)
A counsel of trusted users.
The admin, top mods may set up a group to decide on who to ban and what instances to defederate from. You will not get it right 100% of the time but you also won’t be controlled by one guy in his basement, running 4 instances and 1,000 alts.
Now i’m gonna go back to shit posting.
There are companies that do this with IDs but they are typically already global corporations or SSL certificate authorities already. One example is Verisign and another is Globalsign. Their products are unsuitable however because it connects your real identity to the account. It could be useful for a one time humanness verification though.
The main goal would be to decouple the humanness check from Lemmy and give it over to an authority meant just to create certificates which cannot be linked back to the person. You could probably rate limit each person after the human check for creating new certificate. This would allow creating alts but limit the number of bots one person could create, as theyd need to pass the automate the verification.
One issue would be trust because you would need to trust the authority saying that the person who created the certificate was human