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.
It’s because there are a lot of crypto entrepreneurs (who have a vested interest in the thing) who talk about it like it’s the inevitable future of the economy, which is it’s own kind of exaggerating.
I’m not in the US so I don’t use Venmo, no.
PayPal? They’re all the same. You can think of crypto, especially as offered in the Strike app, as like a Venmo competitor. You just plug your credit card into the app, same as with Venmo and PayPal, Cash App, Zelle, etc and when you want to tip someone crypto, you just go type $5 in and it pulls $5 from your account and converts it to bitcoin at the rate at that minute and lets you send it right away. No middle man, no fees, no lost value due to a drop in bitcoin price, just like Venmo, with all the advantages in privacy and custody that crypto offers.