First off: thanks for running this site.

Second: you made the right choice with downvotes. There are too many people who downvote stuff outside their kink. I've seen more dudes showcasing their junk since you started. That isn't my thing, but it's good for the community.

Third: I'm gonna have to look up this coin thing. You got a link?

Fourth: the gallery sounds cool.

First and foremost - thank you for everything you do running lemmynsfw. You're doing an amazing job and I, for one, appreciate it tremendously.

Re: downvotes, I still believe that downvotes open only to community members is the way to go, but I appreciate you're doing what you feel is best and if you think it's genuinely improving things to turn them off entirely, you do what you need to do. I'm willing to be convinced, I truly am, but I haven't been yet. That said, I found a workaround to my biggest problem with it - hiding read posts without voting - so I don't have to upvote things I don't like just to make them go away. With that in place, I can live with it. At the end of the day, I just want to be able to browse without seeing the same posts more than once.

Re: donations, it's truly a shame that you haven't been able to set something up. I was here right at the beginning, and I was a very early donor, because I truly believe that Lemmy needs a dedicated place for NSFW content, I want lemmynsfw (and Lemmy as a whole) to succeed, and I understand how much it costs to host such a place. So I'd be very happy to donate again if you can find a channel. That said, I don't want to have to do so using some sort of cryptocurrency. Not only because, like Lemmy itself, it's not quite there yet in terms of usability, but also because (unlike Lemmy), at the end of the day I find the entire crypto world to be very scammy and shady, rampant with bad actors. Not to mention that Trocador app you linked to elsewhere doesn't seem to handle setting up monthly recurring donations, which is what I'd like to do.

My suggestion would be to investigate Epoch as a payment processor. I have joined multiple porn sites in the past, and they've all used Epoch for their billing, and at least I personally have never had a problem. They seem on the up-and-up to me (but again, I said investigate - please do your own due diligence). What I don't know is if they handle one-time donations, or if they just do monthly billing.

Re: Gallery, I'll be honest I'm not that interested in new UI's for Lemmy. The default UI + TamperMonkey scripts (LemmyTools + Lemmy Keyboard Navigation) work great for me and pretty much reproduce old.reddit on PC, and Sync took me all of 2 or 3 days to adjust to on Android and now I'm cool with it. I think it's wonderful you want to keep contributing to the Lemmy universe, and it's awesome you found someone to help, but just speaking for myself, I'd view this one as pretty low priority.

Once again, thank you. You invest so much time and energy here it's crazy. Hope you get the donation channel issue worked out very soon, so I can start contributing again.

Well, regardless of how you might feel about the just you’re doing, as a frequent user I think you’re doing great. Moderation of any platform is a thankless job. It’s a lot like politics where the people that want moderation power probably aren’t the ones that should have it.

Downvotes. I think they should be on. I know brigading is def a problem. But on the other hand, not having downvotes enabled forces users to rely on reporting everything to a mod instead of letting the downvotes do their job.

The costs and donation stuff. That’s a lot of personal investment without much in return. Once I’m employed again I’d love to help out somehow.

Good luck on the UI stuff. I been on Voyager app on IOS since it launched so I have no opinions.

Keep up the good work amigo!

I've lurked for a while here and the only disagreeable thing I've ran across on this instance is the downvoting. We all know users are using it as a disagree or dislike button and it breaks my heart to see people putting genuine and authentic OC out there just for other people's enjoyment and receiving that kind of treatment. In the past I've upvoted several posts because of this behavior I've seen with like males posting on gonewild being instantly downvoted. It's definitely crushed someones day or has even stopped people from continuing to create content for this community.

The only reason for downvoting I've seen on here is laziness for not curtailing your own feed (subscribing, blocking) or downright petty behavior of making an anonymous statement that you don't like someone or what they do. There's a report button, a block button, or an unsubscribe button. Instead they've decided to move a few inches over to be an asshole. Whatever the outcome is, thank you for making this change and giving it a chance.

Once downvotes were disabled I stopped using votes altogether.

You can't only give us one option to voice preferences. Alternatively I could just comment on posts I don't like but that would be considered harassment, and honestly that's extremely petty..

Harsh words here, but if you're putting yourself out there and get emotional about getting downvoted, you should probably reevaluate your choices. Go on only fans, this isn't a safe space that should be tailored to your insecurities. Or go start your own community and stay out of the ones that show you that they don't want you posting there. Just saying.

There's literally no point in interacting at all without downvotes. You're taking away the user's choice of what can get popular, that's the reason sites like this are so popular. If this stays I'll just go back to RedGifs. I can scroll all day there without votes and there's more content.🤦‍♂️

Thanks so much for the work you're doing here! As a reddit refugee, I really appreciate it! You're doing a great job 😁

As someone who posts OC, I prefer not having downvotes. We post pictures of ourselves and were getting downvoted due to our not being conventionally attractive (presumably). It was very disheartening.

It makes me more likely to post here with their not being downvotes.

You shouldn't have to put your own money into this, unless you really want to. I would be willing to make a donation if you can find a payment processor.

IMO up & downvotes both have a purpose. Content can be disagreeable without being rule-breaking. I've certainly found downvotes a helpful indicator in the past, occasionally highlighting a poor formulation that caused one of my comments to be misunderstood.

A potential middle-ground might be disallowing downvotes on post, but permitting them on comments?

Either way, big thanks to you for hosting the site, and hope the donations situation gets resolved!

While I don't have any solutions for you I do have enormous amounts of respect and gratitude.

Downvotes: I don't personally miss them because I rarely used them. Either a comment/post is egregious that it warrants a report or reply, else it's worth ignoring. If the Content Creators prefer no downvotes because they're discouraging, then that's fine by me, more content is more better and the report button exists for "rule breaking" and "off topic".

Donations: No solutions only sympathy here. I hope you figure something out, I'm not sure the promise of a donation if/when you do helps or hurts right now. You're right that "sketch" is a barrier to entry for donations, but I can't donate the kind of money that my donation is worth chasing anyways.

LemmyNSFW became my main by accident, but it remains my main because I haven't found an instance I like better. The way you conduct yourself through challenges such as defederation, the Blahaj (sp) conversations, preemptive defence agains Meta... Honestly, it's close to faultless and looking at other instances it's hard to leave. Thank you and much love.

You could create a WordPress blog where people could donate through with PayPal or other similar system. On that blog you can write poems or whatever in exchange for donations. To be precise, the WordPress blog receives the donations that you will use for Lemmy.

I don't really have any useful suggestions unfortunately, but I'd like to thank you for doing all this anyhow ❤️

Hopefully we can all figure out some way to get the donation thing sorted out so that it'd be easy to get monthly recurring stuff flowing, would make it more likely for you to get a steadier income from them.

Building community is hard, it's even harder when everyone is hard and/or wet...

I can't really offer much in terms of advice other than maybe reach out to people that have done this journey before? Top of mind is the guys and gals over at empornium.is which is a very active and alive NSFW community with healthy donation flow. It's of course not the exact same as what you've built here but I'm confident there is bound to be overlaps in challenges and experiences.

You do good work but you should of course not have to spend 1/12 of your income on helping us get off. Unless you're hardcore into FinDom that is...

for the donation stuff, no one has mentioned throne/wishtender, both allow recurrent donations and are used by the nsfw community

Reddit made exactly three good decisions. Downvotes, threaded comments, and subreddits.

Are "coins" like crypto? Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I haven't seen a donation address. Help me help you.

Also, is this the sort of thing OnlyFans can help with?

Monero for the donations and move the domain and instance to a host that accepts monero. Check out monerica.com to find some

On the topic of downvotes. I think this should be something that can be decided community by community. I don't like the blanket ban across all. It makes more sense in some communities than others.