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

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Speaking as an instance admin, I don't want this. It would create the idea that we're selling something to people, and then moderating users that have either received or granted awards would become more complex.

As it stands now, we have an open donation and we don't ask for any information about the donors Lemmy account. I don't want to know

If people like the instance, they can donate and help us cover some costs, and the reward is improved sustainability for our instance.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@[email protected] Also, the vulnerable whilst being the most in need of protection and a safe place, are often the least able to afford to provide financial support.

Prioritising "paying" users by giving them special benefits and worrying about the loss of "income" if they need to be moderated tends towards a road that ends up with the minorities paying for it with their safety instead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@supakaity @[email protected]

Makes my heart full to know that my admins think pretty much the same way I do about this. Doing subscription tier BS against people who have multiple intersections as minority folks is some peak online capitalist ick IMO. Rewarding and/or preferencing folks who can pay is just reinforcing more of the structural crap we face on the daily in user-pays driven meatspace.

#blahajzone