If you haven’t already, subscribing to the hackernews RSS feed seems to cover most news stories in the tech space.

Putting ‘reddit’ in a Google search is genuinely the only way to find a good discussion on most things nowadays.

Let’s hope lemmy gets to this point in the future.

Blockchain has been used previously (see dogetipbot) in a similar concept and worked well.

Since tips would be given at the discretion of users finding certain comments particularly good, a bot would only be able to abuse the system by creating good comments.

I have seen of many instances not being funded sufficiently through donations. If the level of user donations is able to cover only 50% of operation costs for an instance, if monthly upkeep is say $60, then it is reasonable for an owner to subsidize the rest. But, as lemmy (and consequently each community) grows in popularity, a 50% coverage of operational costs is simply not sustainable. That is, without a tactic such as Wikipedia’s notorious pity-ware ad banners.

Providing an alternative method of funding could assist instance owners to keep the community running.

Yes I agree.

One alternative is something similar to awards on reddit. However one could argue that it would impact the visibility of awarded posts by making them more ‘eye-catching’. The only way such a system would not impact post/comment visibility is if it is a private transfer of value.

I know that it is not a popular topic in 2023 but a blockchain currency that allows users to ‘award’ posts/comments (similar to tipping in /r/dogecoin days) could provide instance owners with a source of income by taking a small portion of tips on their server.

Such a system would likely scale alongside user activity (read server load) and would encourage higher quality content. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.