Over time, Lemmy instances are going to keep aquiring more, and more data. Even if, in the best case, they are not caching content and they are just storing the data posted to communities local to the server, there will still be a virtually limitless growth in server storage requirements. Eventually, it may get to a point where it is no longer economically feesible to host all of the infrastructure to keep expanding the server’s storage. What happens at this point? Will servers begin to periodically purge old content? I have concerns that there will be a permanent horizon (as Lemmy becomes more popular, the rate of growth in storage requirements will also increase, thereby reducing the distance to this horizon) over which old – and still very useful – data will cease to exist. Is there any plan to archive this old data?
I worry that these sorts of things would end up turning the site into a popularity contest (or, well, more of a popularity contest than these sorts of sites already are. That being said, I’m quite proud of Lemmy, currently, as it appears to be resisting that). Also I’m not entirely sure how things like payed comment awards would work with everything being federated.
I don’t think awards would make it any more of a popularity contest than updvotes already do. And it would be nice to have an incentivised way to support server costs. How it would work with federation is a good question, though.
Not every feature needs to be federated.
We don’t have karma, so up/downvotes shouldn’t really matter to individuals. But I agree it would be great to have incentives to help out the owners.
What about custom stuff? Like custom emojis, themes, fonts, etc? Those aren’t really necessary but still gives you something in return. Or anything similar, really. I’m worried about awards having an effect like the karma system.
Just a note, lemmy does have a karma system. The default UI doesn’t show this but I believe apps like wefwef/memmy expose this data.
Yeah, Connect shows it too. But in my experience, at least with connect, it’s not reliable. The value changes (sometimes drastically). I noticed this early when my score went from ~80 to ~40 and checked if I had any comments/posts that were suddenly heavily downvoted (there were none).
Esit: Just checked with wefwef - points aren’t even the same between apps.
Edit 2: here’s a short discussion that touches on what I’ve mentioned.