Over time, Lemmy instances are going to keep aquiring more, and more data. Even if, in the best case, they are not caching content and they are just storing the data posted to communities local to the server, there will still be a virtually limitless growth in server storage requirements. Eventually, it may get to a point where it is no longer economically feesible to host all of the infrastructure to keep expanding the server’s storage. What happens at this point? Will servers begin to periodically purge old content? I have concerns that there will be a permanent horizon (as Lemmy becomes more popular, the rate of growth in storage requirements will also increase, thereby reducing the distance to this horizon) over which old – and still very useful – data will cease to exist. Is there any plan to archive this old data?
Sounds like the federated instances should consider opening up for donations and paid features like comment awards and animated shit like Discord or Reddit.
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I liked Reddit Gold when that’s all there was. A super-upvote conveying “I’d pay money for this posting”.
The weird tiers they added later weren’t an improvement on that but fine I guess and the stupid icon thingies they have now? They’re horrible.
So, I’d be in favour of something like the old Reddit Gold but I wonder how it could even work in the fediverse.
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I think that’s an absolutely valid concern.
In the fediverse, we have some tools against abuse of this though because every Gold application would be public just like upvotes are.
I worry that these sorts of things would end up turning the site into a popularity contest (or, well, more of a popularity contest than these sorts of sites already are. That being said, I’m quite proud of Lemmy, currently, as it appears to be resisting that). Also I’m not entirely sure how things like payed comment awards would work with everything being federated.
I don’t think awards would make it any more of a popularity contest than updvotes already do. And it would be nice to have an incentivised way to support server costs. How it would work with federation is a good question, though.
Not every feature needs to be federated.
We don’t have karma, so up/downvotes shouldn’t really matter to individuals. But I agree it would be great to have incentives to help out the owners.
What about custom stuff? Like custom emojis, themes, fonts, etc? Those aren’t really necessary but still gives you something in return. Or anything similar, really. I’m worried about awards having an effect like the karma system.
Just a note, lemmy does have a karma system. The default UI doesn’t show this but I believe apps like wefwef/memmy expose this data.
Yeah, Connect shows it too. But in my experience, at least with connect, it’s not reliable. The value changes (sometimes drastically). I noticed this early when my score went from ~80 to ~40 and checked if I had any comments/posts that were suddenly heavily downvoted (there were none).
Esit: Just checked with wefwef - points aren’t even the same between apps.
Edit 2: here’s a short discussion that touches on what I’ve mentioned.
Yeah, no. No to paid features. That’s how we ended up with reddit.
No, we ended up with Reddit from stupid top-down leadership stupidity. I have no problem with Reddit’s awards and whatnot, I have a problem with them locking kicking out third party apps and limiting the mobile web experience.
If you don’t like an instance’s profit model, just move to another one or host your own. There are plenty to choose from, so competition will keep away the worst of it.
My preference is for monetary subscribers to get access to new features early and to get more of limited features (i.e. if everyone gets X awards to distribute/day, subs get 2X or something), but for features to eventually make their way to everyone else. This allows A/B testing in an interesting way while funding the project. Since the project is FOSS, individual instances can decide to roll them out to everyone or block usage of these optional features from other instances.
If instance admins will be paying hundreds per month for hosting, they should have some way outside of donations to recoup that cost (plus their time spent). I doubt anyone will get rich from it, but hopefully it’ll be enough to help admins offset the costs.
I’d be ok with something like a “donor” flair.
I think we could do some kind of profile badge if you donated. So it wouldn’t influence the way people vote, only if you clicked on their profile will you see it.