Lemmy

There is an idea I've had yesterday. I think it is quite compelling so I felt like sharing it. Rewards have been a really engaging mechanic on reddit and it's a pretty smart way for them to generate revenue. The big and obvious downside of these awards is that the money you pay for it ends up in the hand's of a tech corporation. Lemmy reinvented that entire reddit thing it its decentral and open source spirit, so I tried to come up with some kind of reddit-like award system that follows the same virtues as Lemmy does:

• So I imagine specialized Lemmy instances that doesn't have any actual users, it just pretty much deliveres awards.

• This server's host coordinates their own sets of awards. People can buy them on their site. Something like Liberapay seems to have the necessary infrastructure in place already.

• Awards are basically donations. Lemmy-Gold? that money goes to the Lemmy-Devs. "World award" - buying that award contrubutes to the lemmy.world instance. "Tree award" - raising money for reforestation projects. "Rainbow award" - that could go to a charity doing LGBTQIA+ outreach. You get the point

• Once the award is payed, the awarding server will send it as a comment to whatever is supposed to be awarded. The Lemmy frontends and apps could interpret them in a way that these aren't shown as comments and instead as awards, similar to reddit. btw that whole idea wouldn't even be limited to just lemmy, could work for the whole fediverse

• The award server has some questionable awards? they operate on a profit? - easy, admins can always defederate. If users don't want to see them, they can block those instances too.

I think that lines it out. I think it could be a useful tool for servers to sustain themselves, and it might help raise some funds for organizations for charities who need them. Beyond that, it could help out some creators (comic artists, musicians, video creators etc) who decide to post on Lemmy.

There are some concerns with introducing things that cost money to a network that is meant to be entirely free though. In this case I think it is worth it as long as the awards are donations to good causes, and I believe the decentral nature of the fediverse would keep that in check. Awards should be strictly aesthetic, they shouldn't place any contribution higher up just because someone paid for it.

But I haven't thought everything through yet. There might be some implications about this idea that I haven't thought about yet - so I figured I post here to expore this better. thnanks for reading!