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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[–] alfredalpaca 2 points 1 year 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.