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
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.
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.
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.
A very bad idea for many reasons, and other people have posted them.
Lemmy.world being large is self inflicted, chosen and promoted by themselves. It’s not a surprise that having 100k users pick the same server is a bad idea if you want to keep the costs down.
Their size is creating many problems in the Lemmy fediverse now, because almost all communities and users are on one instance. Anyone not federating with Lemmy.world has no content.
This is why their decisions matter very much for everyone now also.
Funding the fediverse should be done by individual instance owners who wants to support a healthy network. This is no longer possible if you let your instance become super big, and that’s why it’s a mistake to become super big.
Yeah, that is why it’s such a big deal when a big instance defederate from another. If there was a large number of small instances nobody would care.
I think account migration needs to be the next big feature to prevent people from bunching up in big instances. Everyone is new when they start and the biggest one will always be the simplest to find.
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.
