No, that's absolute nonsense. You want people "interacting" with your instance to also be paying you?

I'm all for charging subscriptions from users of your instances. I'm all for commercial instances, but charging from people on other servers is next-level bullshit.

Seriously, I got angry just by reading this. Imagine if Verizon wanted to charge from calls made to their customers. Imagine if Google wanted to charge people that send emails to any Gmail address.

What a stupid concept, and I haven't even touched the crypto part of it.

You shouldn’t host a Lemmy instance if it’s dependent on donations on day one.

You can use donations to offset your expenses, but you should be able to pay those expenses yourself, regardless of donations.

If you suddenly can’t afford to run your instance, because a lack of donations, you scaled too far beyond your own means.

Money involvement = enshitification

Let fediverse be unprofitable.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Another way might be for a Lemmy instance to run a stake pool from the same machine. They could offer perks to users while also not requiring donations directly. Perhaps even reward users with the pool’s native tokens for every post they submit or something (this is a great place to bring up the drawbacks and very real issues that offering a perverse incentive can have: Cobra Effect).

The tech chosen is a key decision(in this case Cardano would be my recommendation honestly because I prefer the tech and not because I have a bag of it) because that stake pool could mint native tokens and use those as a currency for use on their instance if we used Cardano. Native tokens on Cardano are cheaper and not subject to the same fees as other (ERC-20) chains to use and mint. So it would allow that instance to have its own native currency with very little overhead.

Look at Kbin’s old code. There’s some mention of Cardano wallets on there so I’m guessing that the creator of that was interested in this idea.

Cryptobros fuck off

This is the most stupidest idea (yes, double superlative, that's how bad it is) I've heard posted on the Fediverse since... well, the last time I heard the most stupidest idea, and that was also here on the Fediverse. So, congratulations on that front.

There's like 123456 bad things with this idea, starting with the obvious of blockchain and cryptocurrency, and continuing with the fact that "quality of instances" is equated to "consumption of content". Popularity and connectivity are not indicators of quality.

I think the hardest part here is just getting other instances to participate in the scheme. They likely would give a hard no on this.

Realistically speaking, going with the 2. "such action is obviously destructive to the fediverse." option is probably the only way to go if you wanted to do this.

https://sub.club/ is a little bit controversial, but they might have a more workable and viable alternative option for you.

I think that until we get regulation it's better to avoid generating new tokens and asking people to buy into projects. There is an ungodly amount of scamming and financial nonsense right now and small cap tokens would get wrecked over and over and people would lose money. Even DAOs are too young to be used here.

Also people hate cryptocurrency, as you can tell and I wouldn't taint the fediverse with potential a potential cryptocurrency scam. Nope. I think at best you could host an instance and accept donations from large/reputable tokens.

Yeah, despite the strong anti-crypto sentiment on Lemmy, this is exactly the problem that projects like Nostr is trying to solve by integrating Lighting as a first-class payment system in the ecosystem.

Services get paid for by one of four ways:

• Harvesting and reselling of user data. Which is wildly unpopular, and why a lot of people are on Lemmy and not Reddit or Facebook.
• Ads. Which is also unpopular and again why people come to services like Lemmy
• Pay-for-service, which is what you're suggesting, only via crypto, which is easier than accepting credit card transactions, and safer for users.
• The hosted paying for it out of the goodness of their hearts. So, charity. Sometimes there's corporate charity, and that's nice, except for the potential for money coming with strings attached, now or eventually.

Someone always pays; its expensive to host a popular instance. People suggesting you should host for free are selfish freeloaders, so know that some people understand that hosting costs, and sympathize with with your desire to offset that cost.

I like the volunteer micro-transaction model. Those who can afford to pay some amount for good service, and hopefully this provides welfare for those who can't afford to pay. But the cryptocurrency space is a mess at the moment, and an economical currency (probably proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work) needs to gain some traction, and overcome a lot of ignorant bigotry.