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.
Doesn’t the fact that those sites no longer exist kinda prove they needed to recoup costs to stay active?
No.
They stopped running because it’s been 20-30 years and people moved on after a decade or two.
They didn’t die off due to server costs. They died off because companies built for profit centralized sites and advertised them to get people to go there instead.
Easier for large number of people to congregate at a bar than at Phil’s house.