Bots haven’t really been a huge issue yet, but it’ll be a Fediverse wide one so we need a solution that would scale like that.
The current standard for Fediverse content moderation seems to be for each instance to manage its own content moderation policies, and each instance defederates / block those few instances that are particularly repulsive to them.
Taking content moderation as precedent for the issue of bot mitigation, the onus of mitigating bots will be on the instance admins, where known bot farms just get defederated.
I’m also not keen on any sort of pii link to our users, even if it’s Canada post holding that data.
A fair concern, but IMO needing something like this is inevitable. Maybe I’m just “early”, but I don’t think I’m wrong.
If the concern is ensuring each user can’t be linked to a specific set of PII, then an anonymous credential system like U-Prove could cryptographically guarantee that each account belongs to a unique real person, without revealing which real person it is.
(Many anonymous credential protocols, including U-Prove, come with ‘single-spend’ mechanisms that can be used to ensure one user can’t get two accounts.)
Basically, with anonymous credentials, you’d end up with two sets of data: One with whatever PII-linkable info Canada Post gave to Fedecan, and another containing the actual user accounts. But (provided users used Tor to prevent IP address correlation) it’d be cryptographically impossible to link the any of the first to any of the second.
They would just come in via other federated instances
True, but it would at least build a reputation of “1 lemmy.ca user = 1 real person”.
If we’re not selling user eyeballs or data, do we care if a user maps to a real person?
I’d say yes, we should care.
I’m not on lemmy to chat with bots; I want to know that when someone responds to me, that they’re a real person, and that if five people respond to me, they’re five different real people, even if I have no way of knowing who those real people are.
I also want people who see my posts to know there’s an IRL person behind them and that my account isn’t just one sockpuppet of many, though I don’t want them to know my IRL identity.
If I wanted to chat with bots I’d just generate an artificial group chat with a few ChatGPT or DeepSeek agents, lol.
The current standard for Fediverse content moderation seems to be for each instance to manage its own content moderation policies, and each instance defederates / block those few instances that are particularly repulsive to them.
Taking content moderation as precedent for the issue of bot mitigation, the onus of mitigating bots will be on the instance admins, where known bot farms just get defederated.
A fair concern, but IMO needing something like this is inevitable. Maybe I’m just “early”, but I don’t think I’m wrong.
If the concern is ensuring each user can’t be linked to a specific set of PII, then an anonymous credential system like U-Prove could cryptographically guarantee that each account belongs to a unique real person, without revealing which real person it is.
(Many anonymous credential protocols, including U-Prove, come with ‘single-spend’ mechanisms that can be used to ensure one user can’t get two accounts.)
Basically, with anonymous credentials, you’d end up with two sets of data: One with whatever PII-linkable info Canada Post gave to Fedecan, and another containing the actual user accounts. But (provided users used Tor to prevent IP address correlation) it’d be cryptographically impossible to link the any of the first to any of the second.
True, but it would at least build a reputation of “1 lemmy.ca user = 1 real person”.
I’d say yes, we should care.
I’m not on lemmy to chat with bots; I want to know that when someone responds to me, that they’re a real person, and that if five people respond to me, they’re five different real people, even if I have no way of knowing who those real people are.
I also want people who see my posts to know there’s an IRL person behind them and that my account isn’t just one sockpuppet of many, though I don’t want them to know my IRL identity.
If I wanted to chat with bots I’d just generate an artificial group chat with a few ChatGPT or DeepSeek agents, lol.