CAPTCHAs and sign‑up quizzes annoy real people and barely slow down determined bots. As the fediverse grows, we need smarter, more humane defences, ones that don’t push away genuine newcomers. What creative, non‑intrusive ideas do you have? Trust‑based vouching, proof‑of‑humanity protocols, behavioural signals… what feels both effective and aligned with the open social web? I’m building a social media platform and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
It’s old school and expensive compared to what the social media companies use, but there is actually a way to verify they are human without requiring invasive facial scans or uploading your driver’s license to an insecure server. It’s a way to verify with near certainty that someone is human, without requiring them to upload any personal information whatsoever.
Really, this problem was solved a very long time ago. It’s a called a public notary. Traditionally these are used to certify signatures on important paperwork, but notaries could easily serve as a certified human checker.
Let people request or apply for a verified account. Have a system produce a form that lists the user’s screen name, lemmy instance, and the contact details and licensure of the notary. Have a place for the notary’s contact info, but nothing about the account owner’s contact info. The form will state something like, “I,___, licensed notary in the state of ____, observed the owner of this account successfully log in to the account listed on this form.” You could prevent spoofing by requesting that the account owner, while in front of the notary, log into an account, and post a verification code on some thread. Then the notary could confirm that posting through the notary’s own device.
The exact procedure could be tweaked, but the basic idea is to use public notaries (or whatever the local equivalent is) to verify that an account is owned by a human. Now, there wouldn’t actually be anything physically stopping someone from certifying any number of accounts this way. But this is where the hassle factor of in-person verification actually benefits us. Notaries are relatively cheap, but not free. They usually charge around $20 where I’m at. People pay that much for Twitter verification, why not a one-time notary fee? But while the fee is relatively modest, it breaks spammers. Accounts are no longer disposable. They’re pseudo-anonymous, but not disposable.
Online accounts are increasingly necessary to just live in society. And the rise of LLMs means that telling a human from a bot based just on their online behavior is a fool’s errand. And other methods such as uploading IDs and facial scans are privacy nightmares, vulnerable to spoofing, and often biased against minority groups.
Ideally this would be done on a larger scale than just one site. You could have some sort of third party service that just served as a repository for notary-validated human accounts, and then that central repository could send out verification tokens for individual site logins. So you pay $20 to verify you are human once, and you can use that one $20 check to verify your humanity across any number of websites.
That is how you can actually do this without making Orwell spin in his grave.
Plus, I’m sure the notaries could use the business. I’m sure docusign hasn’t helped them out much.