I’m frankly rather concerned about the idea of crowdsourcing or voting on “reliability”, because - let’s be honest here - Lemmy’s population can have highly skewed perspectives on what constitutes “accurate”, “unbiased”, or “reliable” reporting of events. I’m concerned that opening this to influence by users’ preconceived notions would result in a reinforced echo chamber, where only sources which already agree with their perspectives are listed as “accurate”. It’d effectively turning this into a bias bot rather than a bias fact checking bot.
Aggregating from a number of rigorous, widely-accepted, and outside sources would seem to be a more suitable solution, although I can’t comment on how much programming it would take to produce an aggregate result. Perhaps just briefly listing results from a number of fact checkers?
I remember plenty of pre-Reddit forums also being exactly the same way.
If anything, the big difference was that whoever was in charge tended to end up just banning whoever disagreed with them. So most people either learned not to contradict “what was known”, or got kicked out. (In fairness, Reddit also had that problem, but subjectively not as often.)