So... this seems like a good time to start experimenting with Mastodon.
I'm very skeptical about the chances of getting enough network effect to bootstrap a new social media site in general, and even more for distributed/decentralized/non-commercial ones.
Still, recent events on Twitter make me believe there is a chance, and I'd like to help make that happen.
@pwuille I think the big problem we're going to see is that Mastodon has much worse protections against spam than Twitter does. That's not a problem yet. But it will be in the future. And dealing with it could destroy the ability of small instances like mine to federate with others.
If email didn't have big companies like Google pouring money into anti-spam, it'd probably be dead already.
Bitcoin can fix this by making spam costly. But the people behind Mastodon hate crypto currencies.
@silverpill @pwuille Both. Though payments don't necessarily mean paying someone in particular: you can also sacrifice BTC to make a cryptographic identity expensive to obtain.
This is probably better than hash cash as it's easier to determine the value of the payment/sacrifice.
@pete @pwuille Here's how this can be implemented:
- Require actor objects to have identity proof that cryptographically links bitcoin address to actor ID. The mechanism of identity proofs is described in FEP-c390 (this proposal relies on DIDs, but bitcoin address can be represented as did:pkh identifier).
- Also require actor objects to contain a proof of burn. For example, it can be an ID of transaction that burns BTC.
- When the server receives activity from some actor for the first time, it should verify the proof of burn (for example, by connecting to a bitcoin node, looking up the transaction, and checking the sender address and the burnt amount). If the proof is correct, the server accepts activity. Otherwise it rejects activity and adds actor to a blacklist (temporarily or permanently).
The only problem I see here is that transaction lookup can be expensive.
@silverpill @pwuille “transaction lookup can be expensive” just provide a merkle path from the confirmed tx to the block header.
