As a follow up to this post in this community: The Future is NOT Self-Hosted

I have thought about how to set up local, community-hosted fediverse servers that respect privacy and anonymity while still guaranteeing that users joining the server are human-beings.

The reasoning behind these requests is that:

• You want anonymity to guarantee that people won’t face repercussions in real life for the opinions they voice in the internet. (liberty of free speech)
• You want to keep the fediverse human, i.e. make sure that bot accounts are in the minority.

This might sound like an impossible and self-contradictory set of constraints, but it is indeed possible. Here’s how:

Make the local library set up a fediverse server. Once a month, there’s a “crypto party” where participants throw a piece of paper with their fediverse account name into a box. The box is then closed and shaked to mix all the tokens in it. Then, each one is picked out and the library confirms that this account name is indeed connected to a human. Since humans have to be physically present to throw in a paper, it is guaranteed that no bot army just opens a hundred anonymous accounts. Also, the papers are not associated to a particular person that way.