Hello fellow Fediversians,

I have been mulling over an eminently feasible and inevitably controversial solution to a couple of challenges I see with the Fediverse gaining traction, and becoming the primary microblog/forum platform for many users. Also I believe this solution can fill a valuable function of accountability in the form of unbiased archiving.

Essentially the concept is an instance entirely populated by bot accounts, accounts which individually scrape the publicly posted content of public figures from other platforms and reposts that content in quotation, with timestamp, link-back attribution, and cross-links to other posts referred to by the primary post if they exist within the archive. Also may include comments requoting the post if it is edited with new timestamp, etc.

Why do this? Well simply put it would create a consolidated archive of published cintent from public figures which cannot be tampered with for the purposes of accountability, similar to the Wayback Machine, but with the added function of direct interactivity via federated services.

In this way Fedenizens can follow their favorite public figures on-platform and interact with their content in a separate persistent environment, and journalists can have a fully up to date copy of what has been said without filter or revision.

This is all extremely feasible with the help of ML agent scripts, even if APIs are not cooperative.

What are your thoughts? If you were an instance admin would you block such an instance or allow it?

There is of course the issue of how to pick what public figures to add to the archive, but I suggest this can be done by nomination. Who nominates? Well the other function of such an instance would be for individuals to self-nominate in order to mirror their content from other platforms into the fediverse. I suggest that these members can also nominate other accounts, perhaps with a quorum voting system, say 5 nominations succeeds in adding a person to the archive.

Some people may in the end choose to use the instance as their primary, as they interact a lot with the archive streams. I think this would be a welcome outcome.

Decentralized social network Mastodon says it can’t comply with Mississippi’s age verification law — the same law that saw rival Bluesky pull out of the state — because it doesn’t have the means to do so.

The social non-profit explains that Mastodon doesn’t track its users, which makes it difficult to enforce such legislation. Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.

Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws | TechCrunch

Decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with age verification laws, like in Mississippi and elsewhere, and says it's up to individual server owners to decide.

^{Sarah Perez (TechCrunch)}