this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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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.
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Much of the awards you see given out on Reddit was free. It was given out I think back when Alien Blue was bought out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Free awards are the ones ones spammed on random posts so if awards are added, they should be paid only.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes that gave a lot of people a lot of reddit coins, or whatever it is called, used to buy awards. But their reddit gold shold have expired a long time ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It didn’t. I used the last of mine on the last dumpster fire AMA.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I agree with @[email protected] : 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"

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I only gave awards after getting ones that gave me points to give awards, and then gave them either to sad posts or when someone said to someone else, I wish I had an award to give you so take this emoji! (🎖️) so I'd cover for them, as that was appropriate.

This is to say, I suck at awards protocol, and will write fancy comments whether I'm getting awards or not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (10 children)

tl; dr: if you don't want to see seas of ads, awards are the better choice, in my opinion.

honestly, i would be fine with it. I'm not entirely sure what's the big philosophical deal, donations are harder to get, and I'm not so sure as many people are going to voluntarily go and visit the donations page. on the other hand, if the award option is immediately there within the post, one is much more likely to give it. lemmy can simply not sustain itself on the long run solely on donations, especially considering the mass of media content that may be posted. instances can run on them for now. i would prefer them running on dumb awards than on ads instead, and the mole of ads required to make up for the money needed could be really high we'd get reddit level advertisement. hell nah. also, it incentivizes the user on posting quality content if they see the chance of shiny lemming medals, maybe.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Nothing is free on the internet. Its high time we accept that and choose to consciously and directly support services we use. It's just cleaner that way. It's also the only way to keep the internet free(free as in freedom).

Think of it like donating to Wikipedia - once I was able to give back, I started giving back. Soon, I hope to start contributing to lemmy OSS.

This is not even taking into consideration the practical issues with awards like the amount of dev and effort needed to create and manage a payment and "donation distribution" system.

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