Following the death of MP Sir David Amess, MP for Leigh-on-Sea. There is now talk about the problem of online hate speech / online abuse of MPs , staff and other groups)
One of the things that will probably come out of this is the topic of Anonymity on line, as I put in my previous post, this needs to be maintained to protect activists etc. Laws could end up forcing social media to act on this issue.
If the fediverse could perhaps implement some sort of ID module that can be a plug in option for servers, so users on that server HAVE to prove who they are for example. This could be a welcome feature.
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I can verify myself by copying some text from my mastodon profile to a website so it is a clickable link, however due to the way WriteAs works some of the tag metadata ( I think ) is stripped ( I understand why this happens, it is not a bug it actually avoids other problems )
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Sign up id checks could be useful for some groups where knowing who everyone is , is important for the safety of other people both on and off line.
Helps professional people be on here and benefit from being here.
As the fediverse expands there may be groups that join where users should be verified, to maintain the integrity of the group and importantly the fediverse, a few possible examples.
Perhaps a University student group, who want to an Open way for students to join, so sign up , and say upload your student ID for example.
Maybe other groups such as naturist groups you have to be a member of some national naturist club to sign up or to attend sessions , So in the UK you would need to be part of British Naturism, in order to be able to sign up, Which of course would have it’s own ID card.
So there are quite a few examples of how this sort of system would be useful. But, these are positive use cases we can’t just think people are bad people, but it helps those who are ‘good’ people who have no problem with ID checks just sign up and be part of these communities.
We also want to encourage groups to run their own servers, so this would simply be some sort of plug in module, and then form part of the terms and conditions, so don’t like it, you can’t join. It is NOT discrimination as that person can set their own instance up or join one where that is not a rule, but thanks to federation that group can also block other services that don’t implement these checks (or maybe warn users that is the case).
If this can be implemented simply it may avoid the issues I mentioned at or used as a replacement to verify people as users.
Doing this could also be a pre-emptive strike at a solution otherwise we will end up with something that is barely workable being forced on us.
Just a thought, and sorry for the long post.
Regards
Paul
