Comment by rglullis
1 year ago
The days of an open web are long gone. Every server will eventually have to require authentication for access, and to get an account you will have to provide some form of payment or social proof.
Honestly, I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing.
If that was piggy-backed on ActivityPub, Matrix, Solid, or something else decentralised, and if I could say "this bot is acting as my agent, if it misbehaves then I personally get blocked" then there could be something in this. I don't see how to get around artificial identity farms though. That's also not something that payment or social proof fixes. If payment isn't trivial then you exclude genuine people; if it's the act of interacting with a payment processor that's being taken as proof-of-existence then it's outsourcing the ability to interact with anything in the modern world to Visa and Mastercard. That's bad. Social proof is also problematic because if your business is to run an identity farm, then having all your identities interact in legible ways isn't hard, so the social proof needs to be grounded in something global, and there are approximately no good choices.
It doesn't have a global solution and it doesn't need to be implemented only on a specific technology-based system.
I mean, at Communick I offer Matrix, Mastodon, Funkwhale and Lemmy accounts only for paying customers. As such, I have implemented payments via Stripe for convenience, but that didn't stop from getting customers who wanted to pay directly via crypto, SEPA and even cash. It also didn't stop me from bypassing the whole system and giving my friends and family an account directly.
Right, so the gap I'm seeing is that anyone who wants to identity farm just does what you've done. The problem isn't the assurance that you receive, it's the assurance you give to anyone else that any of your customers are flesh-and-blood.
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"some form of social proof."
Sounds like sanctioned racism.
Oh, stop.
I'm talking about social proof as in "You are an student of the city university, so you get an account at the library", "Julie from the book reading group wanted an account at our Bookwyrm server, so I made an account for her" or even "Unnamed customer who signed up for Cingular Wireless and was given an authorization code to access Level 2 support directly".
This is being naive about the kinds of gatekeeping and social proof occurring today. I fully believe you didn't intend to mention social proof to be racist, but with people like Zuck and Elon removing DEI, being racist is social proof you belong in their elite club.
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No it doesn't. Think invites to private torrent sites.