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.