Not a large fee. Just something like the local equivalent of $10 USD.
The deposit sits in escrow during a probationary period while the new account holder has to prove they’re here with good intentions. If the account starts spamming, advertising, trolling, or plugging their slop-coded garbage, they get banned and forfeit the deposit to the instance they signed up with. If they interact in good faith for the “probationary” period without showing signs of being an LLM bot / gaming the system / “karma farming”, the deposit gets refunded in full and they exit the probationary period.
If they don’t interact enough to prove their intentions here a good, the deposit still gets refunded in full but the account gets banned.
This would virtually eliminate drive-by spam and trolls while also funding instances and encouraging positive engagement.
Is it feasible? Probably not. Is this an idea likely to be popular? Nope, otherwise I wouldn’t be posting it here. Do I think this is a good idea? Yep.
You can’t employ any measures like this on what is a fully open network by design.
Someone can set up an instance that doesn’t do this the same day any organised effort to do this takes place
And honestly, for someone who gets a kick out of being a pain in the ass, $10 isn’t going to stop anyone remotely determined.
Still get the benefit of the determined people funding the instances they’re using.
Going by my gut, so happy to be told how I’m wrong, but the majority of (well meaning) users that come to Lemmy aren’t going to drop $10 to see what it’s about, even if there’s a promise they’ll get it back again.
Hell the reason Lemmy.world is the biggest instance is because most of the other instances asked a question before allowing you to sign up. I couldn’t be arsed with that when I was just arriving to see what it was all about, so that’s why I’m on this instance and still on it because I can’t be arsed moving.
Added friction on the web generally ends up discouraging the users you want and does very little to put off the users you don’t
They can browse for free to see what it’s about. That’s how ArsTechnica works, and I’ve been a subscriber there for 10+ years.
Sometimes a little bit of friction and slight gatekeeping is a good thing. As my massive block list can attest, not everyone who signs up here makes the fediverse a better place.
Ars technica would have the same amount of content even if there were 99% fewer users, user comments aren’t why people visit. At least I don’t think I’ve ever read them and I’ve been reading it for around 2 decades, the users are irrelevant to the main purpose of the site.
The same is not remotely true of the fediverse. The quantity and quality of the content is directly related to the volume of users
I agree with all of this.
I don’t think I even realized that ars technica had a comments section until now.
On here, I comment pretty frequently, but rarely if I would be the first commenter on a post. I will often read an article I’m not that interested in here if there’s an active discussion in the comments, and I regularly seek out ask_[blank]_ type communities to read through posts with a lot of comments.
It seems like a pretty horrible approach, not gonna lie.
- Not everyone can pay that money, even if it’s a small amount
- It immediately eliminates privacy / relative anonynity
- The hell with financial processing and bureaucracy
- Dependency on 3rd-party payment processors + notarization by them (no way in hell they’ll allow fedinsfw.app)
- It doesn’t work in the open architecture and protocols like activity pub
- It doesn’t solve neither bots nor propaganda problem
- It immediately makes Fediverse unappealing to anyone who just considers moving away from big platforms (aka “why do I have to pay to these nonames?”)
- Who are the judges? What prevents malicious instances from just stealing people’s money?
it will drive people back to reddit or other forums which were bad before.
Enjoy the 5 users who are going to do that.
A good idea if your want to make sure this place is empty 🤣
Ah yes, the Something Awful approach (kind of). Getting money/financial services involved bring a whole new set of problems and legal scrutiny.
Bad idea.
Driving adoption is much more important than inconveniencing spammers.
You are free to set up a server that follows that rule and you can advertise the concept and get users that way?
Just dew it.
Yay! More power to the rich!
/s
You could try this as a funding model for a particular instance, which is maybe potentially viable if you actually offered some kind of extremely high quality content or moderation…
But it wouldn’t stop drive by shitposts and trolls.
Unless you made the instance insular, self contained, not federated with any body.
If you are federated to any other instance… well they can now access all your stuff without the paywall.
Strictly speaking, you can spin up basically a private forum/webzone, but your ‘business model’ here makes basically no sense unless it is totally exclusive.
Something Awful forums did something kind of like this. Creating an account was $10. If you got banned, you were allowed to create a new account. It was kind of like a swear jar. People there tended to be a bit more educated (still stupid, just educated) and have jobs so the post quality was (usually) a fair bit better than places like 4 chan.
A swear jar where “mangosteen” was a swear lol
But, SomethingAwful was actually exclusively accesible to those who paid that $10.
The Fediverse?
If you are actually federated to any other instance… they don’t need to pay the toll.
You could set up a private, insular instance, but that’s the only way this even possibly makes sense.
dont think it will work, it will just force people back to reddit, its only useful if you are providng “premium content”
It’s an unpopular opinion because it is an objectively terrible idea.
Users pay a monthly fee to an ISP. It is the ISP who should be distributing the resources to the attached entities out there, as they are making profit hand over fist, regardless of the infrastructure involved. Without websites, ISP’s are nothing.
Ill upvote. Certainly would not be on it if this was the case.
I don’t know if it would be a fit for the fediverse, but I do know of what seems to be like a great community that has seemed to survive for a long time where others have long gone by charging something like $5 to sign up one time.
