2y ago

Funding the Fediverse - use an awards feature to fund instances

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

18 comments

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.
- @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 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.
  
  @supakaity @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
  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

Yeah, I really miss the profit-centered incentives that drove Reddit engagement :/ Just donate, you get Lemmy in return.

I don’t think its a good idea. If a user post such valuable informatiom that i want to award them id rather they reap the reward themselves and not the admin of the instance they happened to sign up on.
We should have a lemmy Health Bar that shows us how much funds are still required for the server bill to be covered for the month similar to how reddit showed a decade ago when they were a transparent website like so:
- ah yes stealing from old Reddit
  
  Reddit hardly came up with that thermometer-style fundraising display; it's older then the internet.

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.
- Yeah, that is why it's such a big deal when a big instance defederate from another. If there was a large number of small instances nobody would care.
  I think account migration needs to be the next big feature to prevent people from bunching up in big instances. Everyone is new when they start and the biggest one will always be the simplest to find.

This would incentivise instances to keep growing, as more users would potentially mean more income. I don't think that this is a good idea as it conflicts the decentralized nature of the fediverse.
I would suggest that we promote donations more. Seriously, nobody is talking about that stuff.
Furthermore, "money" doesn't always fix a communities infrastructure issues - people do. Most of the time, admins are a one-person-army. If people would take over work (like moderation, implementing helpful features in code, ...) more often, that might help out the admins more than just throwing money at them.
It is the same as with a lot of open source communities: It's not all about the money, it's about people getting active and involved and helping each other out.

I don't generally agree with the idea because I believe it doesn't incentivize (actually, it goes in the very opposite direction) the cultural shift which is needed. That is, you are the platform, you are not buying anything, you are simply supporting the platform(s) you care about unconditionally.

Sounds interesting. How is Madison handling the funding issue? Are all admins millionaires, living off the stocks they own, so they don’t really care what the server maintenance costs? If admins are just normal people, they probably do care, and in that case, they probably also ask you to donate.
Mastodon has been doing this for a bit longer, so those admins can probably tell you how successful their financial model is. If patreon donations are good enough, then there’s no need to build anything more complicated.
- the server requirements of fediverse instances isn’t that high… plenty of people just run hobby servers! as long as we keep that process pretty interesting that could just continue to be the case: people hosting the instances just as a hobby and not expecting a return!

I think both your idea, and the criticism in the comments are valid (and I'm really glad to see this kind of discussion).
One potential solution, that would sadly require a major technical change, would be for awards to cost hosting-resources instead of money. For example, if Lemmy used IPFS, then people giving awards could need to pin some amount of files for some amount of time in exchange for an award.
This means every award would make Lemmy MORE decenalized, which also helps with admin costs of hosting servers.

Kbin already has some mention of Cardano in the code base.
Does it make sense to tie operating a lemmy instance to operating a stake pool? That could easily fund an instance, though I admit it would change the dynamics of comments and content drastically.

18 comments