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.
Using money as a gate has some issues. If you don’t scale the amount to the region, you effectively exclude that region. But if you do scale to the region, it encourages the spammers to simply setup their operations (either physically or virtually) in the cheapest region (physically also has the benefit of cheap labour).
Requiring unique credit cards could mitigate that, but then there is PCI issues there, and its basically no different to requiring ID.