anonymity and privacy seem to come at odds with a social platform’s ability to moderate content and control spam.
If users have sufficient privacy and anonymity, then they can simply use another identity to come back, or use multiple identities.
Are there ways around this? It seems that any method of ensuring that a banned user is kept off the platform would necessitate the platform knowing information about the user and their identity
I think something like this could occur. Something I kicked around my local, city community was the possibility of our local non-profit ISP (National Capital Freenet in Ottawa, Canada) hosting an instance. In practice, it would likely be an identity instance more than anything else. It would likely require membership, so a) there’s a donation required, which is fine, NCF is a good group, and b) they do need your actual identity, because part of their membership involves an agreement to certain conduct.
NCF is something of a relic from an earlier internet age in many respects, but this kind of thing still exists elsewhere. Maybe this is a role other such organizations can take on, both increasing their relevance and adding another layer of accountability on users re: not being shitheads.
Idk, something to think about.
Edit to acknowledge I’m not a member of NCF right now and have no involvement with them. I just think they’re neat and this could be a neat thing for them to do for my city’s residents.