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.
Please, let’s not. Social media is best without any monetary incentives. If you want monetary compensation for your shit posts you can set up a Patreon or whatever blockchain equivalent you prefer. No need to embed it directly into the platform.
Regarding cryptocurrency, it’s negatively viewed upon because it’s heavily infested with scams. There’s no trust in it anymore. Quite poetic, because “trustless” is one of its main buzzwords.
I’m taking about creators like people who might use lemmy as their primary place to display the fruits of their efforts, be they photographers, artists, programmers, NSFW models, the list is endless. Integration of cryptocurrencies to pay people flies in the face of what these people currently must do, which is go to YouTube or onlyfans to profit, leaving these companies to take more than their fair share. Giving a way to pay people right here would grow the community and decrease reliance on these third party companies that indirectly pay people off the views they generate through ads.
It’s just obvious, and whether or not people like it, crypto payments will get integrated in the l̶e̶m̶m̶y̶v̶e̶r̶s̶e̶ fediverse in time