I had an idea that I wanted to run by people that are more familiar with lemmy and decentralized hosting. I’ve run it by some people I know but they don’t have the familiarity with the fediverse to have it easily explained. The idea is not fully fleshed out so would love any sort of criticism or refinement this group could offer! And, apologies if i’m describing something that’s been discussed to death or been done before.
What if servers came with their own currencies/tokens and ledger?
When an admin hosts a server they get a pool of currency that they can issue out, either as “karma” or in exchange for fiat currency to fund server hosting. For smaller servers this currency could be disregarded, but as servers grow and become more relevant in the greater fediverse, the currency/karma could grow to be valuable.
This “Currency” would be transferable to any other member of a server in any amount - as karma, in exchange for services, or whatever.
Additionally, the currency could be used for voting, maybe on admin teams or moderation policies. These could all be at the discretion of the host. I believe it would be best that the admin team has full control of the currency and the ledger but haven’t ironed all that out yet.
This would encourage a number of valuable behaviors:
- Users would be encouraged to enrich their local communities
- Servers would be encouraged to moderate their servers so their currency is viewed as valuable by other communities
- Funding of servers by the user base is a bit like equity - you buy in to a server but anyone is free to treat the currency as meaningless or as gold
- Bad actor servers currency would be meaningless and irrelevant. If a host is acting in bad faith, the users with no stakes can freely migrate to another server. Ones with a stake can pressure the host to cut it out.
To take it to a mid developed system, I see users of prominent servers with large shares of the currencies as being valuable - they either started the community or were important to its establishment. If I see a post on a programming thread from a user who has 15% of currency of a prominent Computer discussion server, I may choose to value their opinion more heavily. Or not, but more info is always better I think.
In a late stage system, assuming I’m not overlooking something, I really feel like this would be an awesome place to be.
Maybe I shouldn’t use the “Currency” term. These voting shares would represent ownership in the server and community, as well as a tool for governance. Any value assigned to them would be up to the community and the fediverse.
ICOs usually market a new way to mine or a promise of mass acceptance, but all these voting shares would have to back them is a server name and an admin, plus whatever the community can build from there. Additionally it would be fully centralized on the hosted machine.
I would expect the wider fediverse to wholly reject communities that treat them as crypto currencies for quick cash grabs. The goal is sustainability not pump and dump.
