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
Why don’t server admins open OpenCollective accounts or something similar. It seems to work on Mastodon. I would be willing to pitch in to help finance the instance I’m on.
Your instance admin has https://www.buymeacoffee.com/tedvdb
You can verify the link here: https://feddit.nl/u/tedvdb
I am more for going on with donations, with some kind of useless leader board for volunteering activities, to introduce some kind of “safe” and fun gamification.
I have no idea what this could be, I am not very good in creating games
Absolutely, use the Wikipedia model, ask for donations with a target to cover cost.
With an option for ongoing monthly donations (it’s membership, of sorts). I support a few indie spaces this way and really like it.
I think it’s a distraction from the actual interactions. Same way karma is.
I’m all for supporting instances and open source developers, but any kind of reward for a donation creates wrong incentives. Donation is called a donation because it’s a gift without expecting something in return.
I can understand the mindset, but I worry most people don’t think like this.
The thing is, that small rewards for “donations” will likely make the people much more willing to spend money in the first place. Even if it’s as small as a sticker on someone else’s post that costs the servers involved like a handful of API calls. But when a 1€ award is 3x as popular as the 1€ donation, it will greatly increase the funds available to the instance and, hence better servers, more features etc
There is a reason many YouTubers sell discord roles. Many people are willing to spend 5€/month for a stupid discord rank, so I don’t see why it’s wrong to profit of people willing to buy awards
If you prefer direct donation, having something like awards won’t stop you but if someone wants to buy that overpriced sticker, they can as well.
I fully agree with you, karma “whoring” is a serious problem on reddit, awards could lead to the same behavior here if implemented.
Donations are the best way to support the platform, if you want to be “visible” as donator, opencollective allows you to post a message about it, there’s also a sort of top donators page, that’s more than enough in my opinion.
I’m not opposed to ways for people paying out of their own pocket to host to get some funds to help cover that, but I worry it’ll never be well implemented.
I think a good first step would be a default and built in way for server admins to add a small donations banner listing the hosting costs of their instances. That also does have issues though, of course. The person hosting is definitely putting in the most money, but other moderators and admins are contributing labour too.
It’s a tough subject, and many solutions would be rife with abuse. Shit sucks.
I agree with @tigr@lemmy.world : Giving the user the power to decide where the money goes to is the best option. This eliminates the need for a centralised account with a system to spread the money, which would definitely lead to a lot of arguments.
The user could select something like 20% lemmy devs, 30% instance of community, 50% instance their created the account on. This way the user can decide who gets their “donation”
