blog-2026-03-27-facebook-fake-profiles

the situation on facebook is becoming more and more insufferable every single day. apart from the poisoning of the public discourse by bot armies i'm getting drowned in friend request from fake profiles.

if we were to go back to creating a social network for people we have actual social connections with, how could we design a system that ensures the people on it are real, while keeping the effort low (i.e. no manual intervention by admins, not data gathering like license upload)

* invites: signups only by personal invites from existing members
* vouching: two or more existing members would have to vouch for a new account
  not sure how this could be implemented on a UI/UX level to improve over the invite