I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
I think that Lemmy Gold, Silver & Bronze are inevitable, with say a 90/10 cut to instance/lemmy-devs.
It would be best if the developers and the biggest instances agree on a standard payment system to implement into the Lemmy UI.
I’ve already donated to my instance as it’s a regional one, I didn’t buy Reddit Gold, but Lemmy Gold/Silver/Bronze is appealing to me given the money goes to a much smaller local group.
I am fully for this form of payment. Along with that, the instance can also have monthly donor/subscribers badge of some sorts. The hardware costs for maintaining an instance is not something astronomical like the Twitter/Reddit API (something like $500 per month for thousand+ active users). So just having like 50+ monthly subscribers should cover this.
Edit: My instance already has donations and the owner is quite happy with the setup.
I would be up for these kinds of things as long as it doesn’t restrict functionality behind paid tiers. if it only provides cosmetic enhancements like badges or whatever else that’d be cool
Why? If you need to pay money to have a badge so that you can feel superior to others, maybe you should stick to reddit instead of polluting the Fediverse.
didn’t mean it like that just that if we start restricting functionality behind paid tiers it could get to the point where Reddit had that weird turbo thing like discord nitro that you could only post embedded GIFs and stuff if you had it
fully agree though
It depends on the instance in particular. Someone could self host for them and their friends and just cull storage every now and again.