Saw this proposal originally posted on Github and thought it was worth posting here and expanding on
This is an excellent idea, I liked awarding posts on reddit on my old username, probably spent quite a bit with reddit until they permabanned me for god alone knows what reason.
This plus Premium memberships would give the admins of the bigger servers such as lemmy.world a reliable income stream that would enable them to maintain and improve infrastructure. The money would go to whichever server a user that buys the awards or Premium membership happens to reside on (for me it’d be lemmy.world)
Its a simple reality that running a server with thousands of users on it costs money and time, and it has to come from somewhere more reliable and lucrative than donations
It does raise an issue in that a payment processor would be required, and a business would have to be created for that as well. Perhaps several instances could co-operate and share the payment processor and create between them an organisation or business for that purpose, there would need be some means of tagging each payment so that it can be directed to the correct instance
I want the fediverse to survive and thrive, and for that it needs some income beyond donations to support instance server costs, bandwidth and the time and effort and resources expended on battling DDOS attacks, bots etc etc
Or, you could just donate to the admins of the instance. They make it pretty easy in general. This is almost as bad as the “I wanna add ads to Lemmy to help admins cover costs” person. Just donate, and remind others to donate if they can.
Edit: I thought about it further. adding rewards would morph the comment section to a popularity contest a la Snoozerville. On top of that, any instance adding rewards would likely be targeted for defederation by others. I didn’t come here for capitalism, thats basically the root cause of the migration in the first place. And again, all of this is easily solved by donating to the instance admins.
I dont think that donations are going to provide an adequate financial basis long term - an incentivised scheme or paid memberships will provide a more stable long term financial support. I was about to pay for a reddit membership when they permabanned me 😗
Wikipedia.
I don’t think allowing paid boosts/paid flairs for recognition are going to lead to the kind of content Lemmy needs to maintain engagement.
If an instance wanted to implement something like this, they could develop a system for displaying awards on the front end and just store that on a second database. I just don’t think any admins really plan on making that their monetization strategy
Yeah, I really miss the profit-centered incentives that drove Reddit engagement :/ Just donate, you get Lemmy in return.
This would incentivise instances to keep growing, as more users would potentially mean more income. I don’t think that this is a good idea as it conflicts the decentralized nature of the fediverse.
I would suggest that we promote donations more. Seriously, nobody is talking about that stuff.
Furthermore, “money” doesn’t always fix a communities infrastructure issues - people do. Most of the time, admins are a one-person-army. If people would take over work (like moderation, implementing helpful features in code, …) more often, that might help out the admins more than just throwing money at them.
It is the same as with a lot of open source communities: It’s not all about the money, it’s about people getting active and involved and helping each other out.
I don’t generally agree with the idea because I believe it doesn’t incentivize (actually, it goes in the very opposite direction) the cultural shift which is needed. That is, you are the platform, you are not buying anything, you are simply supporting the platform(s) you care about unconditionally.
Kbin already has some mention of Cardano in the code base.
Does it make sense to tie operating a lemmy instance to operating a stake pool? That could easily fund an instance, though I admit it would change the dynamics of comments and content drastically.
Sounds interesting. How is Madison handling the funding issue? Are all admins millionaires, living off the stocks they own, so they don’t really care what the server maintenance costs? If admins are just normal people, they probably do care, and in that case, they probably also ask you to donate.
Mastodon has been doing this for a bit longer, so those admins can probably tell you how successful their financial model is. If patreon donations are good enough, then there’s no need to build anything more complicated.
the server requirements of fediverse instances isn’t that high… plenty of people just run hobby servers! as long as we keep that process pretty interesting that could just continue to be the case: people hosting the instances just as a hobby and not expecting a return!
I think both your idea, and the criticism in the comments are valid (and I’m really glad to see this kind of discussion).
One potential solution, that would sadly require a major technical change, would be for awards to cost hosting-resources instead of money. For example, if Lemmy used IPFS, then people giving awards could need to pin some amount of files for some amount of time in exchange for an award.
This means every award would make Lemmy MORE decenalized, which also helps with admin costs of hosting servers.
