The more people use Fedecan services, the more Fedecan will attract bots.
Which means Fedecan will have to do something for users to prove that they are human. When I joined, you guys had a registration prompt with manual review, but I imagine the prompts you gave could be automatically bypassed by an LLM fairly easily.
The naive solution is to do something like collecting government IDs like Facebook tried at one point. But that’ll just drive people away who don’t trust Fedecan with that info.
What would be your thoughts (admin thoughts, and community thoughts) to implement some ‘proof of unique personhood’ process with something like Canada Post Identity+? Basically, Canada Post verifies that users are human and is responsible for taking care of PII, and Fedecan just trusts Canada Post to not let the same user register multiple times. If done well, I think ‘Canada Post proves that every user account on this site is a unique human’ could be a real selling point for lemmy.ca and pixelfed.ca
Full disclosure, I heard about it in a Reddit thread of people complaining about bugs in it while they try to vote in the Liberal party election. But I bet this is just early adopter bugs, and the Liberal party clearly trusts it with their leadership elections.
Regardless, I think proof of unique personhood is a problem Fedecan will have to solve, and a solution through something as Canadian as the post office just seems more elegant than having the Fedecan admins reinvent the wheel.
I realize you guys (admins) are probably quite busy with IRL work and the Pixelfed launch, so if there was interest in this but no admin capacity to investigate further, I could volunteer to reach out to Canada Post and see what they could offer for non-profit use, including what it would cost Fedecan.
Thoughts?
EDIT: for people concerned about “but then CSIS knows which account is mine”, an anonymous credential system like U-Prove could be used to prove “1 lemmy.ca user = 1 unique real person”, while cryptographically guaranteeing it is impossible to link any particular lemmy.ca user to any particular human identity.
I was imagining that this kind of verification would be part of account registration. So it wouldn’t be like “you have two classes of user account, one has a checkmark or something”, but instead “you have one class of user account, and can’t log in unless you verify you’re a unique human”.
Which, yeah, would probably work better on a new instance, so people can choose “this is the server where having an account means I am a real person” vs “this is the server where I stay anonymous to everyone, including site admins”. An instance that mixed ‘unverified users’ and ‘verified users’ would probably just be hassle with no benefit.
If it was done on a designated instance, I don’t think anything would, at a technical level, prevent it from being done on any particular platform (eg. lemmy vs mastodon vs pixelfed). But I’ll concede that the design of Lemmy may make it the wrong platform for my proposal.
I agree that it’s similar to Twitter’s verified feature.
But from what I’ve seen of Mastodon, Mastodon’s verification feature doesn’t work like Twitter’s - Mastodon just lets you put links on your profile and verify the link, but that’s just you proving to Mastodon that you control the domain name. Sort of like getting a TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt, where you just prove to LE that you control the domain.
It’s not like a ‘verified’ status on the account as a whole.
So the way I imagine it, it’d work for Mastodon, but not by creating two classes of users - it’d just work by ensuring all users on the instance as a whole are verified.
What other platforms are Fedecan considering adding, and what sort of timeline do you guys have for your ‘next expansion’? I want to say there was a page that listed PeerTube, Friendica, Mastodon, etc. as potential ‘future expansions’, but I can’t find it anymore.
Maybe one of those could be the subject of an experiment like this (and if the experiment were successful, Fedecan could use it as a place for the community to hold votes on the direction of Fedecan, if you ever wanted to formally democratize any particular decision).
Friendica is the next one we’re looking at, but I haven’t done anything more than prelim research and securing a domain. I want to make sure pixelfed is running smoothly before adding more.
Mastodon feels well served already, there’s a plethora of instances.