So, never thought i would suggest a form of crypto or token, but it struck me that one of the best ways to help people pay for hosting services would be to create a de-centralized crypto token that when awarded to a user it is send on the back end to their instance.
If we put this token on some of the exchanges then people could pay with either real money by buying tokens and gifting/awarding them, or converting other crypto into Fediverse tokens.
We could even use the same blockchain to allow minting of one off or limited run tokens where users can create their own.
Would also be cool if awards attach to the profile and are federated, but with the ability to make tokens private by the user.
Just a thought, because someone wanted to give me gold for a post, and I linked to our donation page, but man it would be easy if they could have just purchased a token and sent it right then and there without having to go through all the different instance donation methods.
Sadly, I am not a programmer so hopefully this idea is worth a shit and one of you smart people takes it and runs.
Why not just send donations in real money?
Reasonable question and my response is barrier of entry, and everyone likes fun!
If every instance has a different funding model thats fine, but if I want to reward a user or instance I have to essentially track down how to donate to them. With something like an award/token I can in theory buy in my own currancy, and gift. If we build it into the fediverse its self it becomes a low friction method of supporting good content.
Awards, tokens, NFTs can be fun, why not have a system for them, and in the process create a real financial value behind it that is not just profit taking.
Real money has the advantage of actually being useful for the people who receive it, and not having to engage in a crime-driven pseudo-economy.
You wouldn’t have to add the overhead of crypto to create a currency. But this is a good idea. With so many people joining, server costs will increase, but monetization isn’t figured out. It’ll become more and more difficult to keep instances up. Crypto minting takes a lot of resources to do.
Perhaps there is another way. What would a person get with gold on Lemmy? On Reddit, it was ad-free, correct? This would probably have to be a core thing. Lemmy doesn’t support extension at this time.
You get to feel good that someone purchased an award, and gave it to you.
You get to display that award on your profile if you choose.
Your instance gets some level of support because the community decided your contribution was valuable enough to warrant a gift.
Honestly I think it would be less meaningful to have any sort of special privileges or access tied to awards.
And the reason I thought about blockchain is because it could make NFT’s actually useful, and pro-social as their value would be awarded by the community to support the community.
We dont have to use any of the compute heavy chains, it would simply be used to protect the NFT/Token in a way that makes it actually special.
We should invite @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com seems like they really understand the back end of this stuff.
I am a classic “idea” guy on this with little practical skill.
NFTs are the solution no one asked for, hahaha. You’re for sure onto something.
Someone asked me if I’d take donations in crypto. I don’t have anything set up. I so maybe I’m biased against it. I’m not in that world.
I am 100% not interested in crypto, except when I see pro-social uses. I had another idea to use crypto to essentially help remove bias in science. It would be a system similar to F@H or SETI@HOME but it would pay out for the time used to further science.
I see the value of blockchain but so far its only being used by grifters and criminals.
There is some use in unmutable data for ledgers and things. But that’s the only useful thing I’ve seen. AMS offers a blockchain ledger-like application. I almost used it for work but decided on our own solution due to some limitations on AWS and cost.
