Saw this proposal originally posted on Github and thought it was worth posting here and expanding on
This is an excellent idea, I liked awarding posts on reddit on my old username, probably spent quite a bit with reddit until they permabanned me for god alone knows what reason.
This plus Premium memberships would give the admins of the bigger servers such as lemmy.world a reliable income stream that would enable them to maintain and improve infrastructure. The money would go to whichever server a user that buys the awards or Premium membership happens to reside on (for me it’d be lemmy.world)
Its a simple reality that running a server with thousands of users on it costs money and time, and it has to come from somewhere more reliable and lucrative than donations
It does raise an issue in that a payment processor would be required, and a business would have to be created for that as well. Perhaps several instances could co-operate and share the payment processor and create between them an organisation or business for that purpose, there would need be some means of tagging each payment so that it can be directed to the correct instance
I want the fediverse to survive and thrive, and for that it needs some income beyond donations to support instance server costs, bandwidth and the time and effort and resources expended on battling DDOS attacks, bots etc etc
A very bad idea for many reasons, and other people have posted them.
Lemmy.world being large is self inflicted, chosen and promoted by themselves. It’s not a surprise that having 100k users pick the same server is a bad idea if you want to keep the costs down.
Their size is creating many problems in the Lemmy fediverse now, because almost all communities and users are on one instance. Anyone not federating with Lemmy.world has no content.
This is why their decisions matter very much for everyone now also.
Funding the fediverse should be done by individual instance owners who wants to support a healthy network. This is no longer possible if you let your instance become super big, and that’s why it’s a mistake to become super big.