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.
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.
I agree with @tigr@lemmy.world : 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”
I don’t see how that’s any different than what we have now. I’m donating to the Lemmy devs, lemmy.world, and lemm.ee through their individual donation pages.
Unless your saying there should be a centralized option, but I don’t see a reason for that.