We all know that the EU wants age verification for the web. I dont trust my country, the EU and definitely not Instagram, Twitter etc. to implement this in way where my personal data won’t be shared with anyone. But the idea that everyone on social media is a verified human beeing could also have a lot of positive effects.
Imo it would be awesome if every person could have only one single account. Bans and restrictions have much more impact which forces users to behave more like irl. You could reduce a massive amount of bots which would reduce fake news and be a time saver for mods.
As a solution for the privacy issue, I searched for open source passport verification tools and found ZKPassport which makes the proof on you own device without sending you data anywhere. It generates a deterministic Id which is salted and hashed, so you can’t find a real person from a user account or otherwise. Only this Id is sent to the server as a proof, nothing else. The code is open source and its possible to self host the backend for this system.
I try to implement ZKPassport into a lemmy fork to make a small proof of concept for this idea. Of course this needs a lot more security features for a real production scenario, because mods and server owners have much more power and the federation is more complicated with only a few servers that have passport auth enabled and some even have their own implementation of the auth.
So if the proof of concept works out well the question is, would people be rather use passport authenticated Fediverse instances when all of you data stays on your phone?
EDIT: I don’t suggest that the whole fediverse switches to passport authentication, every instance can decide on their own. Therefore you could also have multiple accounts across multiple instances but not multiple accounts on the same instance.
nice idea and all… but the fediverse is already a technological nightmare for noobs… if the fediverse cant maintain participants or attract new ones, it will continue to exist in this zombie state of flat user growth/acceptance. i know many in the 'verse are happy with rolling around in their own echo chambers… (“we like it small, like our testicles!”)
i want to actually move people from those other, terrible systems.
what good is building an amazing, non-walled garden if no one fucking uses it?
Good point and this is probably one of the main issues. I think if the EU really pushes for age verification in all social media apps more people will think about alternative platforms (at least I hope so). And if this really happens the Fedivierse must implement some kind of age check too which hopefully is open source and not an external provider.
I think the key here will be that the solution integrates into some actually adopted standard. In the context of a potential mandatory age verification for EU countries, this would have to be something that is integrated into the EUDI Wallet, which is supported to have support for zero-knowledge proof of certain attributes like is the person above 16? This way it should not be different from what people would encounter on every other social media platform.
EUDI Wallet would be the easiest solution of course. But its quite hard to find out how it really works on low level as its not implemented yet. I don’t think this will ever be open sourced. In the end its maybe just one company that has all the authentication servers and self hosting one requires approval and is very costly so no one does it, just like they did it in Germany.
yeah, and remember theres already a severe barrier to entry. every additional step makes it worse.
im more likely to tell the eu to fuck right off than participate in their bullshit.
ill just move my server to some place that really doesnt give a fuck. verify that.