Saw this proposal originally posted on Github and thought it was worth posting here and expanding on
This is an excellent idea, I liked awarding posts on reddit on my old username, probably spent quite a bit with reddit until they permabanned me for god alone knows what reason.
This plus Premium memberships would give the admins of the bigger servers such as lemmy.world a reliable income stream that would enable them to maintain and improve infrastructure. The money would go to whichever server a user that buys the awards or Premium membership happens to reside on (for me it'd be lemmy.world)
Its a simple reality that running a server with thousands of users on it costs money and time, and it has to come from somewhere more reliable and lucrative than donations
It does raise an issue in that a payment processor would be required, and a business would have to be created for that as well. Perhaps several instances could co-operate and share the payment processor and create between them an organisation or business for that purpose, there would need be some means of tagging each payment so that it can be directed to the correct instance
I want the fediverse to survive and thrive, and for that it needs some income beyond donations to support instance server costs, bandwidth and the time and effort and resources expended on battling DDOS attacks, bots etc etc
I've been using Deezer for the last few years, and its (mostly) great
Have used Spotify in the past, then went to google Play Music, then tried YouTube Music for three frustrating months before coming to Deezer.
Deezer pluses;
Absolutely awesome range, more music from more artists than any other service I've tried, and very little missing. They have every Johnny Cash album bar one, pretty impressive. Their Country and Western catalogue is unparalleled
Although you can only download onto three devices, you have unlimited downloads on each one, as opposed to Spotify which limits you to just 50,000 tracks. I blew past that on my phone in three weeks. I cant see myself needing to download into more than three devices
Good stable Android app, better even than Spotify, as good as GPM, and far far better than YTM. It isnt perfect, can be a little slow to load playlists sometimes, but I have only had to shut it down and restart it 2-3 times in almost a year of use. YTM had to be restarted 2-3 times a day, the Android app fell over more often than a drunk after happy hour.
Great sound quality on mobile and web, I really cant fault it
Good simple web interface too, and I can edit playlists and tracks fairly easily
Good value for money - cheaper and better than the rest
Apparently pays artists better
Deezer minuses;
Android app playlists only have a shuffle play button, and there is no way to change this to regular linear play in settings, even for Premium users, or disable shuffle across the app. This is the biggest flaw by far, and it is shared with Spotify. It is the only aspect of YTM that is superior
The MP3 upload feature is a bit clunky and not terribly intuitive, and limited to only 2000 tracks. However this really doesnt matter as I havent needed to upload much music at all as practically everything I want is available on Deezer anyway
Editing big playlists on the web interface can be a sluggish and buggy, especially moving around large blocks of tracks. Was a bit frustrating when I needed to edit playlists I'd moved across from YTM, I found that often it was easier to just delete almost all the tracks and rebuild from scratch. Now all my playlists are cleaned up it isnt a major - building new playlists works fine
You need to favourite a lot of artists and/or tracks to get the automated recommendations after a playlist finishes to work properly (as opposed to Flow which just works off one artist). Artist exclusions dont seem to work, but now I have favourited 190 artists that doesnt seem to be an issue now. Minor glitch though