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.
I’d love to see an awards system! It’d be great to select the instance that receives the funds with the default being where their account is registered.
Letting users decide where the money goes to is much better yeah.
I think they should be able to set percentages. See here: https://lemmy.world/comment/1068820
tl; dr: if you don’t want to see seas of ads, awards are the better choice, in my opinion.
honestly, i would be fine with it. I’m not entirely sure what’s the big philosophical deal, donations are harder to get, and I’m not so sure as many people are going to voluntarily go and visit the donations page. on the other hand, if the award option is immediately there within the post, one is much more likely to give it. lemmy can simply not sustain itself on the long run solely on donations, especially considering the mass of media content that may be posted. instances can run on them for now. i would prefer them running on dumb awards than on ads instead, and the mole of ads required to make up for the money needed could be really high we’d get reddit level advertisement. hell nah. also, it incentivizes the user on posting quality content if they see the chance of shiny lemming medals, maybe.
Honestly I think awards are a decent way of determining the quality of a post. If a Reddit post has a lot of awards it’s a sign that it is especially helpful/interesting. I know there are exceptions and sometimes the flood of awards at the top of the post is annoying, but often it works for determining the quality.
So people will aim to make posts of similar quality to get awards as well.
Karma on the other hand is too easy to get so its leads to shitty reposts to get a lot of likes. But the people don’t give awards to reposts that often.
Funny how back in the 90s and 00s I could browse BBs without seeing a sea of ads, or any.
Almost like user run communities don’t actually need to return a profit or recoup costs to be active.
might be because traffic wasn’t as much. Also, i understand accepting and missing communities ran by not meeting ends. But implicitly demanding that may be a little too much. also, i imagine there wasn’t nearly as much media traffic in those ages because images took that long to load let alone videos but i wasnt online yet.
Maybe but most of our content today is hosted off site, on YT or Imgur, etc. So that’s not a concern for current sites much either.
Doesn’t the fact that those sites no longer exist kinda prove they needed to recoup costs to stay active?
Forget useless awards, we need c̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶c̶u̶r̶r̶e̶n̶c̶y̶ tipping abilities baked in here.
Edit: never mind
Please, let’s not. Social media is best without any monetary incentives. If you want monetary compensation for your shit posts you can set up a Patreon or whatever blockchain equivalent you prefer. No need to embed it directly into the platform.
Regarding cryptocurrency, it’s negatively viewed upon because it’s heavily infested with scams. There’s no trust in it anymore. Quite poetic, because “trustless” is one of its main buzzwords.
I’m taking about creators like people who might use lemmy as their primary place to display the fruits of their efforts, be they photographers, artists, programmers, NSFW models, the list is endless. Integration of cryptocurrencies to pay people flies in the face of what these people currently must do, which is go to YouTube or onlyfans to profit, leaving these companies to take more than their fair share. Giving a way to pay people right here would grow the community and decrease reliance on these third party companies that indirectly pay people off the views they generate through ads.
It’s just obvious, and whether or not people like it, crypto payments will get integrated in the l̶e̶m̶m̶y̶v̶e̶r̶s̶e̶ fediverse in time
crypto is the beanie babies for this generation. Some people are going to make a lot of money but a vast, vast majority are going to be the proud owners of something worthless that they spent a lot of money on.
OK, thanks
You don’t have to put your life savings in, just use it to send 5 bucks across the network the same way you use Venmo
I can, via AliPay or WeChat wallet, reach out and send money to anybody on the AliPay or WeChat networks in seconds.
How long does an average Bitcoin transaction take again?
For small transaction (under 1000RMB/~US$140) there are zero transaction fees. For small businesses (doing under 10,000RMB/mo. in transactions) there are zero transaction fees as well. After that 10,000RMB limit is reached the transaction fees cap out at about 2% (they start smaller and ramp up as transactions increase).
What’s the transaction fee for Bitcoin transactions again?
If fraud happens when I buy something (like a business sends fake goods, or doesn’t deliver anything, etc.) the Ali Network (or Tencent for WeChat) steps in and reverses the transaction. I lose nothing. In addition if a business was egregious in its fraud, or has a history of doing it, the Ali Network (or Tencent) can and will remove that business’ ability to, well, do business. A cancer is excised.
What’s the recourse for bad transactions on Bitcoin again?
Donating via Bitcoin is the dumbest single way to donate. It’s slow, it’s expensive (robbing the people you’re donating to of cash!), it’s unreliable, and it’s prone to abuse.
To what end? So it can get converted into a real currency immediately? I understand (since you spammed it everywhere) that you can donate via crypto, but that’s only because crypto can be converted into a real currency.
Give it up, my friend; fetch isn’t going to happen.
Crypto isn’t money pal, it’s a digital commodity that doesn’t have a purpose other than to be traded. There is a reason crypto’s value is measured in actual currencies rather than it’s purchasing power, as you can’t really buy much with it.
You’ve been awarded lemmy gold!
Edit: Wow, I didn’t expect this to take off like this. Thanks for all the upvotes! xD
Could we like, not immediately talk about monetisation 1 month after leaving reddit? If you want to support your instance host, you can ask for a way to donate.
The hard truth is that long term, we likely need another way besides donations to keep the ecosystem alive.
I would like to see some numbers first. Donations work fine for mastodon.
Edit : here are mastodon.world financials https://blog.mastodon.world/
Looks like donations work surprisingly well with the current userbase and current expenses. The projects on opencolective are doing quite well.
Lets just hope this stays that way for a while.
I doubt its sustainable that way forever though if more reddit users and subreddits migrate. So if donations arent enough anymore in the future, I hope they choose something like awards instead of flooding the site with ads, analytics or paywals.
Donations seem to work fine for Wikipedia as well. Same with internet archive. We should not underestimate the willingness of people to support a good cause.
This really needs to be higher.
Running a Mastodon or Lemmy server is surprisingly cheap. With some specific tweaks and rules (esp. hosting images and video elsewhere), it can get even cheaper.
If your only goal is to break even, then it’s amazingly easy. Roughly 1 of every 20 users contributing $1/month. Adjust the numbers as you see fit.
Or a single, non-datamined ad at the top of the page.
Or maybe some people just can’t imagine how this could work without being centered around money.
Lemmy has been around for years. New instances are popping up as new users come in. So far, I haven’t seen an instance suffering from lack of funds, but others being funded for months ahead, some even donating excess funds to Lemmy devs.
All while topics like these pop up every other day. For me, it looks like catastrophization. Seeking solutions for problems which do not exist (yet? Not even sure about that).
I dont expect a decentralised platform to be profitable and also think donations are better than in-app purchases.
But I dont want big instances to suddenly turn off because they cant afford it anymore or the development being behind so much we loose users to missing features.
Looking at the donation pages of lemmy instances there are enough donations for now but it is good to have a plan B for in case we get flooded by users not willing to donate so this platform survives long term. That plan B should be as least Invasive as possible,so no ads,analytics or paywall. Thats why I suggested something that is completely cosmetic.
