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.
  • DarkenLM@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    KBin just shows the data that the ActivityPub protocol sends. Anyone could create their own instance and see all reduces.

    • Coelacanth
      3·
      1 year ago

      I know that, and they could, but an average user isn’t going to do that.

      I think the ActivityPub protocol should be adjusted so voting is anonymous, but maybe I’m in the minority there.

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        An average user isn’t an unsavoury troll.

        I don’t see how ActivityPub could be adjusted so voting is anonymous. Not without letting instances just make up whatever vote totals they want with no way to tell that something shady is going on.

        (Actually, I can think of one way to do it, but it’s very complex and involves blockchains so I wouldn’t expect an average user to want that either).

        • Coelacanth
          2·
          1 year ago

          I swear I saw something about it on GitHub but this is all beyond my competencies so I will defer to the experts.

          I think it would be desirable if it was anonymous, or at least less easy accessible. But as I said elsewhere, I’m open to change my mind, it’s possible I’ve just missed the value added by it.