> Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake.
Oh, so, if I have $1m I can register a bunch of accounts and kick people I don't like off the platform? You said this thing was supposed to be censorship-resistant, right?
Hell people will do it for free if they disagree with someone, you don't need $1m of accounts, you just need to say something that angers 100k people who report you and get you banned... isn't that something that people specifically complain about with regards to "censorship" with current platforms? Like I'm not saying they have to read it, but if others have the ability to stop me from publishing than that's not really censorship-resistant, it's just mob-controlled censorship. Censorship-resistance is something like IPFS - you have no control over what I put on IPFS. You don't have to access it, but you can't stop me either.
Also, if I register enough accounts so that 100k people never complain about any one account do they gradually go back to being healthy accounts? Or if not, then when I spam a bunch of people then I can get them kicked off they will be banned permanently (or have to pay another $10 to restore access), right? How long will this service last when I'm kicking every single user off every single day?
"Consensus" will always take into account the consensus of attackers too... sure you can always have a trusted party who oversees censorship and you can depend on to make unbiased and fair decisions that 100% of individuals will agree with (lol) - but in that case, why do we need crypto at all? Why not just let that guy run the server/why not let him build blocklists for the mastodon server?
it's the SMTP copypasta except the thing you have chosen to ignore is sybil attacks, and the massively complex thing you are handwaving as being trivial is building a reputation system, and that would solve all the problems for the non-crypto space too.
https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
(really, it's the exact same problem, it doesn't matter whether the format is facebook posts or emails. Email is actually an extremely decentralized and censorship-resistant protocol - there is no central authority who can stop me from putting my message into your mail server, or even see what I'm sending you (if we connect directly). We can have completely private conversations that no central authority can stop! And what's what makes it terrible, because it turns into utter white noise with vague "reputational" signals like "dirty IPs" - those are your "blacklisted commenters" on facebook, and spam emails are still a problem. Or at least they were, until a centralized authority (Google) effectively came to take over the market and solved the problem for us... but then there's censorship again. And if you are winding up about "PGP message signing" or anything else, you need to go back to the "spam solutions" copypasta and find the bits that apply to you, because people thought of that 40 years ago before crypto was a gleam in satoshi's eye. Is spam solved? No, because your idea doesn't work.)
Spammers have been willing to "pay per account" forever, and that's the problem, they are more willing to pay than the actual users are. So any model needs to survive in the face of an asymmetric foe that has more resources than you... and almost all of the "asymmetric" strategies will require either a huge amount of cooperation between "honest" participants, or a few "super participants" who have actual power (ie censorship) over the system.
And remember - the original idea behind bitcoin literally came from HashCash - which was an attempt to reduce spamming by requiring a unique proof-of-work for each message.