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
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.