Yea the UFoI is intended to be a mostly social construct. There is some technology to facilitate voting and providing verification of who is or is not in the UFI. But overall its almost entirely social in nature.
You can see an early preview of our website here: http://UFoI.org
The UFoI defines the minimum standards of which policies instances need to implement in order to federate with each other. Currently, there is nothing that looks to ban a specific user across different instances. If the user has alternative accounts, as long as they’re not breaking the minimum standards on those alternative accounts, there is nothing in UFoI that compels an instance to ban those alternative accounts.
Pretty much what Ryle said. UFoI is mostly concerned with instances, individual members are handled by the instance admins. We just expect instances to moderate with our code of ethics in mind.
The only way duplicate users is an issue is when it comes to voting rights. For now we are just using gitlab accounts to act as a proxy for voting with the assumption its hard to have a bunch of different gitlab account. In the future I think the solution will use PGP keys and keyoxide.
@freemo @ufoi i'm not sure if this is the right place to ask right now:
how are "alternates" of a user handled with UFoI, especially when it's an alternate not on a UFoI instance? are accounts the moderated item or the people themselves?
the previous blocklists always had some entries like "alternate of $baduser" and alike.
i could rephrase the question as: is the target to keep timelines clean or is the target to cancel a person - even if some alternates aren't posting things against the rules.