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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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).
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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Eew please god no.
please no!! reddit looked like las vegas with that award system. terrible idea!
I have never used it on reddit. I have always found them useless
I used them a couple of times, I like them; I use them when the post I REALLY like doesn’t have much upvotes. Like when I see post with 24 upvotes that deserves 400+ I give it gold, so the user will still feel happy.
Disclaimer though, I received all my points from winning a big sub contest, I didn’t ever pay for them.
Here is an example of awards on Kbin.
The KBin awards are akin to Stack Overflow’s award system, which I don’t mind, it’s a small fun system on the side. Reddit’s award system, on the other hand, can go back to the hell pit whence it came.
I didn’t mind the reddit version when there was only one award and it granted the awardee premium benefits for a month. I felt like that was a good balance. Not that I think lemmy needs that kind of system-- at least not yet.
I’m still just not sure how I feel about Kbin
Also allowing people to see who downvoted (sorry, “Reduced”) them can’t be a good idea as the site grows and attracts more trolls/unsavoury individuals.
KBin just shows the data that the ActivityPub protocol sends. Anyone could create their own instance and see all reduces.
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.
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).
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.
I don’t understand your argument, wouldnt transparency in voting EXPOSE trolls? Pretty sure they’ve already caught some shenanigans that wouldn’t have been so obvious without this functionality. So many instances (and even subreddits) just hide the downvote button, with the transparency if you dont like it dont downvote maybe install an extension that always hides the downvote button for just you.
So, the problem is that seeing who downvoted you lets a certain type of person track down and stalk people who disagree with them. Not only could your inbox get filled with “Why’d you downvote me bro?”-messages, it could lead to these people following others around to unrelated comment threads and harassing them as “retaliation”.
I take it these people haven’t found Kbin in any significant numbers yet and so it hasn’t been a problem, but I’d be wary for the future.
Let me ask this question instead. What value does it add to know who downvoted you?
You can block people like that. And you will be able to see that they’re “retaliating” against you because of the transparent voting system - you’ll be able to say to the admins “look, this guy’s done nothing over the past six hours except downvote every comment I’ve ever written” and if you’re on an instance that cares about such things he can be taken care of.
I understand that but those things are added discomfort and hassle. If voting was anonymous, they would not be able to identify me and thus I wouldn’t have an insult in my inbox to wince at before blocking the user and I wouldn’t have my page full of retaliatory downvotes to report to an admin.
These aren’t world ending flaws, but they are the trade-off. The negative downside to public voting. But what is the upside? What is the user level benefit I’m getting that makes tolerating the downside worth it?
I love this idea of “retaliatory downvotes”. People take fantasy Internet points so ridiculously seriously!
Well, one upside is that it lets voting be a thing, since ActivityPub is public by nature.
It should be possible to build bots to detect these voting patterns. Reddit had plenty of user-created bots that helped moderators identify toxic or otherwise undesirable users to ban, something like that could be done in the Fediverse too. It’s pretty early yet - there isn’t even an API for Kbin as far as I’m aware - but once something like that is in place you might not even notice when your stalker gets caught.
Well, one upside is that it lets voting be a thing, since ActivityPub is public by nature.
I mean I wouldn’t call that an upside in this context since the argument starts from the basic assumption that up/downvotes exist.
If votes by nature have to be public due to necessary operations of the ActivityPub protocol the entire argumentation becomes meaningless.
I still maintain that I prefer making accessing this this information harder rather than easier. Yes, a dedicated user can still spin up their own instance and check, but that added bothersome task is going to be enough to deter a lot of people.
It’s kind of like a door lock. You can’t stop anyone from getting into your house if they really want to, but locking your front door still reduces the risk of having your possessions stolen due to the added friction.
Trolls know why they’re being downvoted; for reasons I don’t understand, they seem to enjoy it.
You probably shouldn’t be downvoting people having a good-faith discussion, but if you do, the venn diagram of people having a good-faith discussion and unstable enough to harass someone for downvoting them is probably pretty small. Small enough for the block function to mitigate it.
Flip it around. Anonymous downvotes would let anyone spin up a lemmy instance, fill it with sockpuppet accounts, and downvote everything by hundreds or thousands of downvotes, and it would be impossible for users to know the difference.
You’re right, it wouldn’t be questions about why the downvote so much as just straight insults probably. I’m too hesitatant to use that sort of language so I didn’t represent the type of message properly.
Flip it around. Anonymous downvotes would let anyone spin up a lemmy instance, fill it with sockpuppet accounts, and downvote everything by hundreds or thousands of downvotes, and it would be impossible for users to know the difference.
So the primary argument for why public downvotes are beneficial is that it helps prevent spam-infuencing posts and comments? Is this then not more of a problem with bot detection? And just how easy is it really to “just spin up an instance and fill it with sock puppet accounts”?
Now? A bit troublesome. Soon enough, as the tooling improves? Trivial.
You don’t even need to spin up a Lemmy instance specifically. There’s some very small script-driven ActivityPub servers already showing up that can be used for this kind of activity with ease if you’ve got a minor amount of technical chops. Give it a few months and someone will have turnkeyed an ActivityPub harassment engine.
I don’t know that I’d call it the primary argument, just an argument. And containerization makes hosting your own lemmy instance trivial.
Personally, if it makes people a little more judicious about applying a downvote, maybe that’s a good thing.
What would you say is the primary argument?
can’t be a good idea as the site grows and attracts more trolls/unsavoury individuals
Edit: Nevermind, you answered this below.
Is strikeout a thing? Let’s see. Edit2: Nope.
~~I’m curious as to what your actual concern is here. Like, what do you imagine will happen?~~
I’ve never wanted anything less in my life.
I think the idea is fine but the label of “awards” kinda sucks. Reddit often had them misused (e.g. giving wholesome on non wholesome posts). I like how discord frames it’s super reactions and think it would be a better system. Only the name, the way they should act should be largely the same, I don’t want animated reactions like discord does.
I hate the idea very much. Thanks for asking.
Nothing is free on the internet. Its high time we accept that and choose to consciously and directly support services we use. It’s just cleaner that way. It’s also the only way to keep the internet free(free as in freedom).
Think of it like donating to Wikipedia - once I was able to give back, I started giving back. Soon, I hope to start contributing to lemmy OSS.
This is not even taking into consideration the practical issues with awards like the amount of dev and effort needed to create and manage a payment and “donation distribution” system.
I have an idea. Now I thought about it. Lemmy will allow the server owner to create a “paid” community. The name of this community will be like “helpforlemmy.world” or “coffeeforruud”. People will pay to be able to subscribe to this community. These communities will be passive and only people who want to help will have sent money by subscribing.
I think we should avoid paywalls as much as possible and if any, only add cosmetic purchases.
I’m not even sure upvotes and downvotes are good for conversations, because people use the voting system as an agree/disagree button, users think the downvoted person is wrong. Awards would fuel the astroturfing problem imo.
Please no rewards. This is not reddit. I think a donation system would be much better way to go about it.
Let the content and conversations just happen. It’s more organic that way.
No awards please
Can’t we just stick with normal donations instead of turning this place into a sea of rainbow vomit.
