There are issues that have been on my mind for a few days, and I wanted to talk about them with you.
Downvotes
As you may notice, downvotes have been completely off for the last few days. I did this because I couldn't resist the pressure of some friends :/ I still don't know what to do about this. The majority of members probably want it to be completely open. As mods, posters and admins; some think it should be closed, some think it should be restricted (I guess).
I guess there is no solution that makes everyone happy. I realized I don't have admin skills in stressful situations, I'm a fucking stupid lol :D I miss @gabe so much.
lemmyposter212 suggested "fuzzy votes" or something that can work for us too. I think I'll just ghost this issue for a while.
Donations
As you know, all our donation accounts have been closed. Since it was my first time opening a site in the NSFW area, I had no experience. I reviewed some adult donation sites but most of them were shady. Honestly I couldn't trust them.
There are only coins now. But I guess most people don't want to deal with coins. It is because I didn't get any donations about 4 months now :D Those sent from Github Sponsor or Patreon were also returned to donators as well. I received $200-ish donations so far.
We are currently the 2nd largest instance in Lemmy. After lemmy.world, we're bigger than lemmy.ml and lemm.ee! I don't think it will work this way anymore. On an annual basis, I need to spend a month's salary for Lemmy NSFW.
Almost all of them have a NSFW banish in their TOS or have previously applied and not been accepted. I'm trying to apply some fiscal hosts on Open Collective tho.
So I don't spend time in the NSFW space - but some quick googling leads me to think that only fans is ok with AI provided you are over 18 and your not doing deep fakes.
It sounds like cryptocurrency is the best solution here, unless anyone can vet a payment intermediary that’s safe and accepts transactions for NSFW stuff. And then of course has great security and can protect you from being doxxed.
I haven’t been to your instance but I think you can try posting official Monero and Bitcoin addresses and directing users there with a pinned post, and maybe something in your sidebar - I’m on mobile so not sure if you already have something like that. Might be worth even creating a Vanity BTC address to increase the legitimacy - something like 1LEMMYxyzetc. There’s a lot of people out there that believe in the practicality of certain crypto coins, so I think XMR and BTC are your best bet. They may be willing to help if they come to your instance all the time.