Fediverse

Fuck that. Keep cryptoshit out of this

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.

And who decides what counts as bad behavior worth forfeiting funds? Sounds ripe for corruption.

Yeah, that seems like it would have too much perverse incentive for admins to ban users they don't like, both to remove them and get money for doing so.

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?

No.

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.

What's stopping bad actors from making really cool looking servers, attracting lot's of people who pay a deposits to join. Then when the time is right. The mods just prune everybody take the deposits for themselves, making out like bandits.

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.

The problem is that the amount that would be too much for the regular user would still be very acceptable for a company's marketing department or a crypto-phishing operation.

I think that manual approvals or waitlists are still a smaller barrier than getting into crypto and paying money just to join. Also, there is literally no reason not to join one of the smaller instances instead of the big ones.

Crypto has a bad reputation in general because of both how its unregulatedness allows "Big Money" to make it even more its own playground than other markets and also the insane number of rugpull scams going around.

That said if you think this is valuable and some people at least would like it, you're free to do it, and I actually encourage you to try it. Host your own server, implement your crypto-based auth on top of it, and see if people join.

I had a similar thought I've been mulling with giving each server their own unique currency that would function like server "equity." Voting on moderation, federation, etc could be handled through it.

If a server elects to, they could ask users to "buy in" to a server at registration. This could help cover hosting costs while still giving the user something.