I’m really enjoying lemmy. I think we’ve got some growing pains in UI/UX and we’re missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn’t going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
I know that it is not a popular topic in 2023 but a blockchain currency that allows users to ‘award’ posts/comments (similar to tipping in /r/dogecoin days) could provide instance owners with a source of income by taking a small portion of tips on their server.
Such a system would likely scale alongside user activity (read server load) and would encourage higher quality content. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.
Sounds good as long as it doesn’t provide an incentive to pay for posts or comments to rise to visibility because then there’ll just be advertising everywhere
Yes I agree.
One alternative is something similar to awards on reddit. However one could argue that it would impact the visibility of awarded posts by making them more ‘eye-catching’. The only way such a system would not impact post/comment visibility is if it is a private transfer of value.
Honestly I would hate that, but if that’s what keeps the lights on then I’ll deal with it. I would prefer to move to an anonymous donation model like Wikipedia but I’m skeptical that will work.
Why would it have to be blockchain? Plus like the other commenter said, that provides incentive to bot comments and such. Donation based stuff works fine.
Blockchain has been used previously (see dogetipbot) in a similar concept and worked well.
Since tips would be given at the discretion of users finding certain comments particularly good, a bot would only be able to abuse the system by creating good comments.
I have seen of many instances not being funded sufficiently through donations. If the level of user donations is able to cover only 50% of operation costs for an instance, if monthly upkeep is say $60, then it is reasonable for an owner to subsidize the rest. But, as lemmy (and consequently each community) grows in popularity, a 50% coverage of operational costs is simply not sustainable. That is, without a tactic such as Wikipedia’s notorious pity-ware ad banners.
Providing an alternative method of funding could assist instance owners to keep the community running.