Monetization is often a struggle for big open-source projects, donations are nice but I think they often fall short.
Something to consider is to add Rewards people get if they donate, which they can then hand out to posts or comments that they like. I feel this could add a lot to PieFed and is a great feature to have.
The potential extra income from people buying rewards could be used for better servers, more storage, to cover dev costs etc.
I have no clue how Federation would work around this it’s probably complex. Thoughts?
Edit: We could have a option to hide badges for those that don’t want this feature. It’s purely cosmetic
Are we talking about PieFed the software or piefed.social the instance? We should seperate development cost from hosting cost.
If PieFed the software grows to 1M users and the users are distributed across a lot of instances, the cost for hosting is split between all instances.
If the instance piefed.social grows to 1M users we have a different problem and that is centralization.
Money can pay for new features like the ability to upload videos or keep images longer etc. Currently I think images older than x years get deleted, money can solve this.
Thought experiment: Reddit has 400 million weekly active users. Let’s say PieFed grows to 10% of that.
That means that there will likely be multiple instances with over 4 million weekly active users, how do they pay for that? Who pays for all the images (and hopefully video) that those users share?
These type of sites don’t need to host video. Hell, I’d argue they don’t need to host images either for the most part. They’re huge drains on it. People can embed from external sources.
The Fediverse is not remotely ready to incorporate anything like this currently, it would cause too much anger.
I disagree, images add a lot and it’s already built into PieFed quite nicely. Relying on things like imgur to host your images comes with a lot of problems, adds friction and is bad UX.
If PieFed becomes 10% the size of reddit, which I hope it does, how do you propose the hosing costs of the ~40 million weekly active users are paid for?
Piefed is a long, long way from that. Cross that bridge if it happens. I personally doubt it will.
Easy Cop-out
Huh? Cop-out for what?
To think of possible solutions and not just shut down any ideas.
If you think my suggestion is bad, I challenge you to come up with a better one.
There’s no immediate financial imperative to do this. I wouldn’t complain if Rimu if tried to do this now, but I don’t think it would go down well at all.
that’s unrelated to the software, it’s an option for the instance admin to choose how much they want to host