Monetization is often a struggle for big open-source projects, donations are nice but I think they often fall short.
Something to consider is to add Rewards people get if they donate, which they can then hand out to posts or comments that they like. I feel this could add a lot to PieFed and is a great feature to have.
The potential extra income from people buying rewards could be used for better servers, more storage, to cover dev costs etc.
I have no clue how Federation would work around this it’s probably complex. Thoughts?
Edit: We could have a option to hide badges for those that don’t want this feature. It’s purely cosmetic
does PieFed having the classic “cover our monthly hosting costs” progress bar OG reddit used to have?
donating used to give you account gold (which didn’t allow you to give awards) but still gave you access to extra features (like saved posts I believe)
since PieFed is open source maybe these could be tied to extra hosting capacity and not paywalling features? ie you donate X amount you get to upload Y amount more images/video to share on the instance?
I’d be weary of being able to pay to give others awards as that allows actors with more capital to sway conversations and astroturf a forum that’s supposed to be democratic.
I think rewards need to be purely cosmetic and not influence default ordering. Users should also be able to turn off reward viability.
That way you get all of the benefits with none of the drawbacks.