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
I dont think that donations are going to provide an adequate financial basis long term - an incentivised scheme or paid memberships will provide a more stable long term financial support. I was about to pay for a reddit membership when they permabanned me 😗
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I don’t think allowing paid boosts/paid flairs for recognition are going to lead to the kind of content Lemmy needs to maintain engagement.
If an instance wanted to implement something like this, they could develop a system for displaying awards on the front end and just store that on a second database. I just don’t think any admins really plan on making that their monetization strategy
how about this for an incentive: when you donate money, you help keep the lights on for the instance that you’re using.