this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:
Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.
This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.
We can setup some sort of raffles. $5 donation for entry, winner(s) gets a $100 (or higher depending on participation) giftcard of their choice.
The good thing is: Free development can an does happen (see Linux!). Hosting seems to be the main issue. An ideal solution would be each instance having a capacity limiter, which automatically redirects a % of content to other instances if it becomes to much. Is this possible?
That's a bit complicated. Account handling is by nature of federation, linked to your source instance. There is discussion on GitHub about moving account export up the chain just to help people move from lemmy.ml to other instances.
Keep that discussion pinned and if you want you can see if you can help with a PR if you're able.
Even then this would just let you download your data, not necessarily migrate it to another instance because each instance runs with it's own Postres database and the user comments and such on that instance are linked to that database. So if that database goes, that data goes.
Can you elaborate? I have the impression, that we need to think more deeply about how the donations should be distributed. E.g. a users fund are donated proportional to their subscribed Communities? I think it's difficult, as people's time spent on a community doesn't necessarily mean it's proportionally valuable. I've had a few subreddits which I used rarely but we're quite important to me.
Each instance is free to field their own donation drives for their running cost. They even can display advertisements if they feel like it. There is no "one size fits all" here, and there shouldn't.
Each instance is potentially in a different jurisdiction, making it hard to transfer money, etc.
Not only that, but I think having funds centrally collected and then distributed is a particularly bad idea. It comes with too much opportunities for bad blood. Money and friendship don't mix.
The only unifying constant of the network is the software that runs it. This though needs to be improved in various areas, for which centrally collected funds would be ideal, as every instance will benefit from it. No operator of any instance would have a disadvantage from advertising the central donation drive. They would benefit from it by having better software in the end.