cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1239521
Reddit used to have something similar to health bar showing how much “gold” was bought to support the website. but later on out of greed they started using it as a paywall.
We can have a health bar that doesnt paywall ANY features and very transparently displays funds raised\used for a server. It can be used to display how much funds its being supported, how much server costs are, salaries for open source maintainers, mods, etc.
Yeah, this makes sense. The health of the instance we’re on is our concern too. Since a Fediverse instance is not a faceless entity and doesn’t pull the same capitalist shenanigans on its users, the users will probably be more willing to support it with donations if they see something like this. Many other donation-funded sites have something similar.
Initially, it’s probably fine to have it included in the server rules blurb on the side, but it should probably just be part of the API for mobile clients, and possibly communicated to other servers too? So if some valuable content is on an instance that’s not doing well, you can deal with that. If it regularly gets valuable content but can’t sustain itself, people might donate even if it’s not their home instance. Otherwise, it can be copied somewhere safe, if it’s basically abandoned.