Unironically I think some sort of Lemmy Premium feature will need to exist. Currently servers are hosted on goodwill. If Lemmy gets even half as big as Reddit the server costs to instance owners will be astronomical. I think a lot of servers will go under first before Lemmy gets that big. So there needs some cash flow but if it’s reliant on donations idk how well that’ll go. People will probably just donate to their own home server or the most popular one to keep their communities up. (Also I suppose an instance owner could blackmail the community if they got big enough to like take down 20%+ of Lemmy’s use with their shutdown) but with that structure I can see Lemmy becoming homogenized to like 3 servers ran off donations and stuff. Goodwill doesn’t pay the Internet bill.
But if Lemmy as an organization did centralize accounts like people are asking them they could do some sort of premium service and dump it into a pool. And then like if a premium member interacts with an instance at all it throws like a fifth of a cent at them for like every upvote/comment/etc. The biggest servers would get most of it but it’d give new servers some incentive to grow and put up compelling content.
Unironically I think some sort of Lemmy Premium feature will need to exist. Currently servers are hosted on goodwill. If Lemmy gets even half as big as Reddit the server costs to instance owners will be astronomical. I think a lot of servers will go under first before Lemmy gets that big. So there needs some cash flow but if it’s reliant on donations idk how well that’ll go. People will probably just donate to their own home server or the most popular one to keep their communities up. (Also I suppose an instance owner could blackmail the community if they got big enough to like take down 20%+ of Lemmy’s use with their shutdown) but with that structure I can see Lemmy becoming homogenized to like 3 servers ran off donations and stuff. Goodwill doesn’t pay the Internet bill.
But if Lemmy as an organization did centralize accounts like people are asking them they could do some sort of premium service and dump it into a pool. And then like if a premium member interacts with an instance at all it throws like a fifth of a cent at them for like every upvote/comment/etc. The biggest servers would get most of it but it’d give new servers some incentive to grow and put up compelling content.