Fact is, the Lemmy ecosystem needs money to handle the growing server reqirements as more people migrate as well as the development cost of new features (I know Lemmy is OSS but the devs should still get some compensation for their effort).
Seeing how much some reddit users love awards so much that they cant stop giving money to Reddit to award posts protesting the api change, this could be a great way for users to voluntary support the ecosystem. It can be easily ignored by users not caring about them (clients could even add an option to hide them), but users liking the feature can go wild and this time the money goes to volunteers keeping this alive instead of greedy admins, power mods and investors.
Though there would be some big organization questions attached: attached:
- Which server handles the payment? A centralized one, the one where the post was made or the one where the user giving the award account was created.
- How will the money be shared between the Devs and the individual instances in a way that is fair but cant be abused easily.
Ok, should I write a check? Who do I make it out to? How bout direct deposit: just give me the bank account number. Why is lemmy anti-crypto?
“Why not just give them money?”
Because every way to do it is trackable and cryptocurrency offers privacy-protecting ways to pay people. This should be important to this community. Nobody batted an eyelash opening their wallets to Reddit for coins, awards and nfts, but crypto is the scam? Ok
Well you could always try to give cash ;)
Snarky remarks aside, I’m not saying crypto is inherently a scam (although I do think it is more or less reinventing the wheel). I think it’s less efficient than fiat currency at this point since you need to convert your crypto to make much use of it. I can see your point about privacy protection given that transactions and accounts are supposed to be anonymous (although I have some privacy qualms about all transactions being put onto a distributed public ledger), and anonymity can be necessary if you’re suffering from persecution. But with anonymity, how do you prove your ownership over your crypto assets should you lose access to your account, or have it stolen? That’s a very critical drawback to crypto.
Monero would be the obvious choice of cryptocurrency for this community. No public ledger. Like the lemmyverse here, no currency is powerful until many people use it, so instead of resisting, which simply reinforces the status quo and keeps the companies in control, dive in and help grow the ecosystem, like you’re doing here!
Regarding your last question, I could ask those about cash. Crypto is a lot like cash, and if you lose it you’re kinda screwed. You just need to learn how to keep a hardware wallet safe.
Like the lemmyverse here, no currency is powerful until many people use it, so instead of resisting, which simply reinforces the status quo and keeps the companies in control, dive in and help grow the ecosystem, like you’re doing here!
I would hesitate to draw too many parallels between lemmy and crypto. Speech, ideas and social media is one thing, currency and transactions another, and I’m not sure applying the same philosophy to both is necessarily wise. Traditional currencies and banking have had centuries to work out problems; they may not be perfect but I don’t see a fundamental need to throw them away and shift massively to crypto. Of course I could be wrong, so I’m not against experimentation, but we do need to experiment prudently and be open to critique :)
Regarding your last question, I could ask those about cash. Crypto is a lot like cash, and if you lose it you’re kinda screwed. You just need to learn how to keep a hardware wallet safe.
True, which is why most people keep their most of their cash in banks: it’s more secure there and if anything happens you can always sue the bank if it comes to that. With a hardware wallet, what recourse do you have? Even if you take all the precautions you can, no system is completely foolproof, and as an individual it takes a lot of time and effort to do that yourself.
