Mastodawn

lesnake Jul 10, 2023

How would you feel about awards on lemmy?

https://lemmy.world/post/1294142

How would you feel about awards on lemmy? - LemmyWorld

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.

murphys_lawyer Jul 10, 2023

Could we like, not immediately talk about monetisation 1 month after leaving reddit? If you want to support your instance host, you can ask for a way to donate.

The hard truth is, that long term, we likely need another way besides donations to keep the ecosystem alive.

static Jul 10, 2023

I would like to see some numbers first. Donations work fine for mastodon.

magic_lobster_party Jul 10, 2023

Donations seem to work fine for Wikipedia as well. Same with internet archive. We should not underestimate the willingness of people to support a good cause.

murphys_lawyer Jul 10, 2023

It’s almost like people are willing to spend money to a good cause, when they are not constantly being pressured and scammed into it.

567PrimeMover Jul 10, 2023

I would love to see a social media network run under this model, and I think lemmy, kbin, etc are great candidates for that. The decentralized nature of the fediverse allows costs and user load to get spread out to other instances, vs. something centralized which concentrates all that on one org/person. I feel that makes a donation only system much more attainable

Pooptimist Jul 10, 2023

Maybe something like signals donator badge would be a better solution

lesnake Jul 10, 2023

Looks like donations work surprisingly well with the current userbase and current expenses.

Lets just hope this stays that way for a while.

I doubt its sustainable that way forever though. So if donations arent enough anymore in the future, I hope they choose something like awards instead of flooding the site with ads or paid only posts.

static Jul 10, 2023

So when scaling up

You expect that : costs per user rise and donations per user drop?

I expect that: donations per user stay the same, costs per user drop, and external subsidies rise.

lesnake Jul 10, 2023

Basically yes, but I also assume the cost per users drops/stays the same

I think the next ppl joining are mostly teens who dont consider donating,but would consider occasionally buying something like awards

I doubt external subsidies can cover the missing donations.

static Jul 10, 2023

And even then there could be donated vs award servers.
I prefer to focus on the donated ones.

lesnake Jul 10, 2023

I assume you that awards are optional for each server.

How would you determine if awards are enabled? The server of the community or the server where the account was created?

static Jul 10, 2023

I'm anti awards and status. donations on feel good work good enough.

static Jul 10, 2023

You do not, awards do not propogate to other servers.
Thenidea of awards is stupid anyway.

Spaceman Spiff Jul 10, 2023

This really needs to be higher.

Running a Mastodon or Lemmy server is surprisingly cheap. With some specific tweaks and rules (esp. hosting images and video elsewhere), it can get even cheaper.

If your only goal is to break even, then it’s amazingly easy. Roughly 1 of every 20 users contributing $1/month. Adjust the numbers as you see fit.

Or a single, non-datamined ad at the top of the page.