It looks like in the future, we’re gonna verify our identities. Social media for the masses will be done with Identity verification. That’ll be the way to tell bots and people apart, stripping anonymity in the process.
Word that Mastodon is talking of age verification, we will definitely see instances adopt it. All is pointless if federating with an instance without age verification, and that makes me wonder if the Fediverse might split apart under that pressure.
It’s pure speculation, but we might see a verification tag, for those who did verify their identity, and those without are left without any tag, same as bot accounts. If the majority of people do eventually verify, that’ll cast doubt onto accounts who lack the tag. Instances could also go full whitelist mode, and all of those instances force you to verify to join. If that is to be the case, we either verify to talk to people, or we don’t and face the overwhelming bots.
But what do you think, how will the Fediverse navigate a dying internet?
Lemmy is going to navigate it by being too small to care about.
Instances subject to the legal systems of jurisdictions with age verification laws probably need the feature to exist to continue operating legally.
I don’t think the current structure of any of those laws would require instances to demand verification from other instances, and any instance operator who did such a thing would be socially unacceptable to the current population of the fediverse.
Oh, I won’t be verifying my identity, ever. It’s basically self-doxxing.
Or I’ll host my own server and mark myself as verified. I mean, does one even verify if an ID check was actually conducted? Who would be bothered to check?
To host an instance you basically have to dox yourself anyways. I had to put my information into my domain register because my shit could get nuked otherwise, they do redact that shit in who.is but still, either way you give your info to someone.
I will never verify my identity for any social platform. Period.
So if the fediverse enforces as a whole such measures its future would be one without me in it.
Time to start a new dark web social media network that can only be accessed through TOR.
I wouldn’t mind age or “is a person” verification done with privacy protecting means, such as GNU Taler blind signed token solutions that are open source and audited by independent security teams, but that isn’t getting implemented. Instead every “verification” service is a literal privacy nightmare simultaneously linking identity to speech and harvesting user data for sale.
Non-EU parts of the world should be encouraged to have better data privacy laws as part of their trade deals with the EU.
Some users will be fine with it, some won’t, me included. As for me, I’ll just leave any and all instances that will require verification. If all forums start to require verification, I’ll just start hosting my own
uglymarvelous HTML forum. :DHTML is beautiful. Its web 3.0 that is ugly.
Finally a wholesome comment! :)
It is very likely that smaller communities will form, based on the networks of trust. The local feed will begin to mean more, and local-only communities will proliferate.
You could still visit the rest of Fediverse, should you need something specific.
I guess it’s back to good old forums, hosted in Mukibukistan on the other side of the world.
Wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
I have no desire to attach my social media activities to my IRL identity. I’ve seen people attacked and get fired for having strong political beliefs. I myself will not visit businesses whose owners have been vocally supportive of certain viewpoints. So I will not participate anywhere that requires verifiable identity, and I think it will be stifling to the point of losing any value. Plus, I’ll be honest, I’ve been around long enough that I’ve given voice to thoughts that were immature or ignorant or enraged and I’m damn glad I don’t have to defend myself on a daily basis and even happier that they aren’t associated with my IRL identity.
There are ways to establish an identity without personally identifying information, such as how Mastodon verifies that you have control over a domain. That’s as far as I’m willing to go.
I will disconnect from anything with age verification. My post history and content are more than adequate to prove who I am. I will leave the internet entirely out of ethical disgust. I despise this world of lazy cowards and exploitive criminals. I want nothing to do with it. I will not shrug my shoulders when people come to steal my citizenship, rights, and liberty. Pathetic slaves that roll over to this shit are no better.
A lot of likes when this part is less and less true and at best more and more intensive to verify on:
My post history and content are more than adequate to prove who I am
I quit Reddit years ago and moved on to the Fediverse. I am deleting my Discord account by the end of this week while moving on to Stoat & Fluxer. Social media is not of any interest to me. When ever a platform becomes unbearable for me to use, I leave and do not look back.
I quit Reddit years ago and moved on to the Fediverse…Social media is not of any interest to me.
I mean, the Fediverse is distributed rather than centralized, but being distributed doesn’t make something not social media.
No need to nitpick. We are two humans communicating so obviously this is a social activity. A community theater is social media by the loosest definition, but the term “social media” now commonly means the big centralized commercial product platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
There are worlds of difference between the manipulative ads and algorithms of social media and the activity feeds on Lemmy. It’s the difference between a shopping mall and a community yard sale.
The people who create mastodon having a discussion about what to do about age verification laws some instances may legally be required to comply with isn’t the end of the world.
Time to move servers and restructure ownership
Yeah, I think the meeting is more about what, if anything can the mastodon team do to support them. Can they offer a software solution? Do they want to? Etc…
Better Tor and I2P integration. Clients with panic buttons. Possibly integration with lockdown mode. PQC push. All of these would help.
Probably go to IRC again, but the fediverse will be fine.
You can hide from authority, and that’s fine, but you still have to grapple with the reality that machines can make very convincing text. Your niche underground software will not shield you from this problem. We need new solutions to adapt to this reality.
We need new solutions to adapt to this reality.
Problem should solve itself once investor capital is no longer flooding into these AI companies and subsidizing the cost of generating that text.
Once these spammers have to pay the full cost to generate their LLM-generated spam, it will no longer be financially viable for them to do so for so little return. They’re only doing it now because it’s free or next to free. Having to pay what it actually costs will slow the pervasive AI slop to nearly nothing.
Isn’t that kind of like asking a 6 year old what they’re going to do when they retire?
Die with it i suppose
