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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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.
I would like to see some numbers first. Donations work fine for mastodon.
Edit : here are mastodon.world financials https://blog.mastodon.world/
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.
It’s almost like people are willing to spend money for a good cause, when they are not constantly being pressured and scammed into it.
Maybe something like signals donator badge would be a better solution
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
Looks like donations work surprisingly well with the current userbase and current expenses. The projects on opencolective are doing quite well.
Lets just hope this stays that way for a while.
I doubt its sustainable that way forever though if more reddit users and subreddits migrate. So if donations arent enough anymore in the future, I hope they choose something like awards instead of flooding the site with ads, analytics or paywals.
So when scaling up
You expect that : costs per user rise and donations per user drop?
I expect that: costs per user drop, donations per user stay the same, and external subsidies rise.
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.
Edit: Also I assume ppl in their early 20s are more likely to buy awards than donate.
And even then there could be donated vs award servers.
I prefer to focus on the donated ones.It was a bit mean/dishonest from me to frame costs for you.
my guess of dounations just does not match yours.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?
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.
Or maybe some people just can’t imagine how this could work without being centered around money.
Lemmy has been around for years. New instances are popping up as new users come in. So far, I haven’t seen an instance suffering from lack of funds, but others being funded for months ahead, some even donating excess funds to Lemmy devs.
All while topics like these pop up every other day. For me, it looks like catastrophization. Seeking solutions for problems which do not exist (yet? Not even sure about that).
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I dont expect a decentralised platform to be profitable and also think donations are better than in-app purchases.
But I dont want big instances to suddenly turn off because they cant afford it anymore or the development being behind so much we loose users to missing features.
Looking at the donation pages of lemmy instances there are enough donations for now but it is good to have a plan B for in case we get flooded by users not willing to donate so this platform survives long term. That plan B should be as least Invasive as possible,so no ads,analytics or paywall. Thats why I suggested something that is completely cosmetic.
I think a good start before all of that would be for struggling instances to tell their user base that they are struggling.
Not going to lie, awards like that would probably make me start looking for another new platform again. I don’t want that part of reddit, personally. I want comments that are there to be there, not comments that are only there to get the most positive feedback. For me, doing this would take lemmy further away from being an open forum, and move it closer towards being a lame popularity contest. I can only see the same jokes so many times.
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I think it’s a distraction from the actual interactions. Same way karma is.
I’m all for supporting instances and open source developers, but any kind of reward for a donation creates wrong incentives. Donation is called a donation because it’s a gift without expecting something in return.
I fully agree with you, karma “whoring” is a serious problem on reddit, awards could lead to the same behavior here if implemented.
Donations are the best way to support the platform, if you want to be “visible” as donator, opencollective allows you to post a message about it, there’s also a sort of top donators page, that’s more than enough in my opinion.
I can understand the mindset, but I worry most people don’t think like this.
The thing is, that small rewards for “donations” will likely make the people much more willing to spend money in the first place. Even if it’s as small as a sticker on someone else’s post that costs the servers involved like a handful of API calls. But when a 1€ award is 3x as popular as the 1€ donation, it will greatly increase the funds available to the instance and, hence better servers, more features etc
There is a reason many YouTubers sell discord roles. Many people are willing to spend 5€/month for a stupid discord rank, so I don’t see why it’s wrong to profit of people willing to buy awards
If you prefer direct donation, having something like awards won’t stop you but if someone wants to buy that overpriced sticker, they can as well.
I don’t want the comments section to look like the inner cabinet of the North Korean army
I like this comment. Let me award you the flaming golden sun of glory medal of the people.
Can we leave the karma system and awards with Reddit? Allowing voting in comment sections for pseudo-moderation by the users is good, but when it turns into a scoring system the conversation devolves into a competition to see who can craft the most palatable opinion to get the most imaginary internet points.
Despite all my thoughtful and helpful comments I made in my 11 years on reddit, you know what my top comment was?
- Comes in
- Kills the Queen
- Tanks the economy
- Leaves
What a legacy.
47k updoots, and 27 awards.
This right here.
I used to (a very, very, very long time ago) contribute on StackOverflow. How much? I haven’t even logged in for over 7 years (and didn’t contribute a good two years before that) and my account is still in the top 0.71% overall.
Let me tell you how I racked up that score.
I monitored the site in off-hours (easy to do with my time zone). I found new questions for the most popular programming language on the site (back then this being Java). I then did what the asker should have done: I Googled. I then wrote an answer (a correct answer: this is important) and got first-responder points.
And here’s the funny thing: I don’t program in Java. I hate the language. I know enough Java programming to be dangerous. VERY dangerous. But 18% of my points came from answering Java questions. A further 15% came from answering C++ questions which is at least a language I know … but also despise and won’t work with any longer.
This is how easy it is to game fantasy Internet points: whether “karma” or “gold” or whatever you like. And if you start providing these fantasy Internet points you’re going to start attracting people for whom high numbers of them are important and they will do what I did to the detriment of the ecosystem. (I mean at least in my case my answers were right. Disingenuous that I of all people answered them, but at least correct. This is not the case for all points whores.)
I never cared for them on Reddit and used third party tools to remove or hide them.
I don’t like that they can be used to shop visibility.
I would like that it gives an opportunity to fund instances but I would hope we could discover another way to do this.
I’m really not looking for a Reddit replica. And um, being rewarded for a good comment isn’t really something I need. Or anyone needs. I think getting a cookie for a good comment can be left behind
Edit to add - I should have read the rest of the post more carefully, but I stand by my initial sentiment. Money needs to be funneled into those working hard on this, but I don’t know, I don’t want more and more Reddit features coming out
You’ve been awarded lemmy gold!
“Thank you, kind stranger”
Edit: Wow, I didn’t expect this to take off like this. Thanks for all the upvotes! xD
Edit 2: I can’t believe I’m getting so many updates, thank you everyone!!!
Just donate if you want to support your server.
Awards are special actions reserved for people who pay, that don’t improve the platform anyway. It’s enshittification.
It baffles me how people seem fixated on the gamification of a discussion and payment system, as if somehow we’re not adults who can see that the servers cost money, they provide us value, and we should help defray the costs (directly, through donations/payments). Clear/transparent information on instance costs and available funding is all we really need. For the instance owners it would be nice to have some built in code to provide this as a common location so they can disseminate the info with as little additional effort as possible, ideally with hooks to several payment systems they can connect - esp given the global nature of the platform.
Because, sadly, it works. Humans are social animals and gaining and displaying status is hard wired into us. You might not be interested in status in this way (but there are likely others just as irrational that you do), but enough people are such that this would likely generate a lot more money than just donations.
Appealing to and reinforcing toxic aspects human nature is always a shitty argument. Whatever we’re trying to do here let’s not be regressive
as if somehow we’re not adults who can see that the servers cost money, they provide us value, and we should help defray the costs (directly, through donations/payments).
I really wish this was how humans worked.
But then I remember people will regularly drive on state-maintained roads to their government subsidized free public healthcare, get treated the same day and then go home and write an angry internet post about how we have to cut taxes.
please no!! reddit looked like las vegas with that award system. terrible idea!
Eew please god no.
this
Edit: thank you for the gold, kind dear gentlesir or gentlemadame.
Edit2: wow I never expected to wake up to so many awards, who’d knew my most updooted comment would be about this?
I pass. Gamifying social interactions leads to abuse and lowers the quality of posts, comments, reports, etc. It’s a streamlined path to enshittification.
Only user-provided 🏅🐭 awards here, at most.
Even “user-provided awards” should be kept out. It provides nothing substantial to the conversation.
It’s like saying “This 👆”, “I agree”, or “Take my upvote!”, all of which can be expressed by simply voting on the comment, which actually has an impact.
Fully agreed. That’s why I said “at most” because that’s the worst I’d tolerate, but I still think upvoting is already enough.
I hate the idea very much. Thanks for asking.
Can’t we just stick with normal donations instead of turning this place into a sea of rainbow vomit.
The growing server requirements…
I think like 99% of people picked accounts on the top 10 servers, and there are hundreds of more servers out there that have only a few users. Why do you all flock to the same server (Lemmy.world in particular) and then go “shit this is getting expensive guys”. :)
Fediverse. Federated. Not Centralized. Not Reddit.
This technology supports speeding out, so many people (instance admins) share the costs.
And the cost of storage? I get that the load is balanced, in a sense, but it still seems as though there will be significant costs if each server is going to keep all the posts that have been federated to. And the traffic itself just to remain in sync could also be fairly dramatic if we get to the size of Reddit. Unless I’m missing something about the technology, which could very well be true.
I picked lemmy.world because my mastodon account is on mastodon.world and the admin has been good there. And because browsing and subscribing to communities off-instance is a huge PITA.
