We all know that the EU wants age verification for the web. I dont trust my country, the EU and definitely not Instagram, Twitter etc. to implement this in way where my personal data won’t be shared with anyone. But the idea that everyone on social media is a verified human beeing could also have a lot of positive effects.
Imo it would be awesome if every person could have only one single account. Bans and restrictions have much more impact which forces users to behave more like irl. You could reduce a massive amount of bots which would reduce fake news and be a time saver for mods.
As a solution for the privacy issue, I searched for open source passport verification tools and found ZKPassport which makes the proof on you own device without sending you data anywhere. It generates a deterministic Id which is salted and hashed, so you can’t find a real person from a user account or otherwise. Only this Id is sent to the server as a proof, nothing else. The code is open source and its possible to self host the backend for this system.
I try to implement ZKPassport into a lemmy fork to make a small proof of concept for this idea. Of course this needs a lot more security features for a real production scenario, because mods and server owners have much more power and the federation is more complicated with only a few servers that have passport auth enabled and some even have their own implementation of the auth.
So if the proof of concept works out well the question is, would people be rather use passport authenticated Fediverse instances when all of you data stays on your phone?
EDIT: I don’t suggest that the whole fediverse switches to passport authentication, every instance can decide on their own. Therefore you could also have multiple accounts across multiple instances but not multiple accounts on the same instance.
Yes, and it needs to be fought politically.
No. No, it could not. I grew up with the idea of the Internet being a mostly separate space from real life, one where our identities do not matter as much, and want that to be the case as much as possible. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
I grew up in the same mindset as you describe.
But this reality never manifested. Instead the perceived anonymity of the social media sites, combined with the algorithm, tears our societies apart.
I don’t think that the fediverse has enough reach for such a system to make sense, but Met, Google and Tiktok certainly should use it.
The opposite of “tearing our societies apart” would be “uniting our societies”.
I come from a country (Austria) that once tried a political system where all of society was forced to unite behind a strong leader. That didn’t go very well.
So I refuse to think of “tearing our societies apart”, without further qualification, as an inherently bad thing. Better that than enforced unity of all of society where no dissent outside the Overton window is ever allowed.
Agreed that that’s a major problem with today’s Internet. When I started to use it, the main way to publicly communicate online was web forums where threads were sorted by topic and then chronologically by when they were last posted in, i.e. with no recommendation algorithms. At the time, I was a preteen and dreamed of a world where that was a mainstream thing and way more people would be posting on forums like that.
Way more people use the Internet now, but it’s not structured that way at all anymore, and I do not understand what was so wrong with it that it needed to be replaced with algorithmic recommendations. Did that concept just not have a functioning business model, or what?