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
It’s important to separate piefed software development cost, and cost to host instances.
Images/video if that was a feature is a burden for the instance admin in terms of storage cost, not the software developer.
That’s be like donating to a game developer for more FPS for your game. The burden of FPS would be on the user and the GPU and hardware they decide to use.