Hear me out.
SomethingAwful forums are notoriously “human,” because they charge $10 for a user account. They don’t have problems with spam/scam/shenanigans that exist on platforms where accounts are free.
Fediverse instances are not currently monetizable - and they should stay that way. But there are still costs to operating one, especially if it’s very popular.
Instance admins charging a minimal fee to register a user account would address both of those concerns, especially the former, especially in light of how the Nicole thing has taken a horribly dark turn.
Trying to gatekeep an already niche platform that way will kill it off.
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Quality over quantity.
Payment is not a guarantee of quality.
From a feasibility standpoint it wouldn’t work unless the popular ones bought into the idea and defederated from any free instances. The whole idea is terrible for federation.
When quantity = 0, then quality = 0
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There’s a ton of technical tools that can be added to platforms that can mitigate problems with spam, poor-quality users and abuse.
Digg asks $5 for early access
Personally I find it already difficult enough to convince people to give the Threadiverse a try, I can’t imagine what it would be like with an entry fee
Minimizing malicious content and vote manpulation is worth it. I get that it would have to be a widely implemented “standard” to be truly effective, but with enough buy-in (pun intended), it would also be easy for admins to defed from instances that have free open registration.
In this scenario, the closed instances die and the open instances do not.
https://gui.fediseer.com/ is already a thing
I think giving people the option to toss some money the way of whoever is hosting their instance is fine. Making it a requirement would kill Lemmy.
Probably not immediately, but the drop in old users coming back and reduction in new users joining would eventually cause it to end up with no users
I 100% agree with this.
Something Awful’s system, where it’s just a one-time fee instead of even a “minimal” monthly subscription, seems like a nice additional option. Although, then you’re taking kind of a leap of faith that the instance is going to stay around… but yes, running an instance is work, it’s not just a favor that the users do to the instance operators by joining up with it and making it popular.
I think about this sometimes…
