Its definitely something that can be added by the side of the instances, not in general in the main Lemmy branch.

Yeah, this makes sense. The health of the instance we’re on is our concern too. Since a Fediverse instance is not a faceless entity and doesn’t pull the same capitalist shenanigans on its users, the users will probably be more willing to support it with donations if they see something like this. Many other donation-funded sites have something similar.

Initially, it’s probably fine to have it included in the server rules blurb on the side, but it should probably just be part of the API for mobile clients, and possibly communicated to other servers too? So if some valuable content is on an instance that’s not doing well, you can deal with that. If it regularly gets valuable content but can’t sustain itself, people might donate even if it’s not their home instance. Otherwise, it can be copied somewhere safe, if it’s basically abandoned.

definitely agree, but it shouldn’t be just funds for server costs, also funds that go towards the developers of lemmy. if we want lemmy to improve, this needs to become the developer’s primary full-time job, and the only way to do that is to have a much more substantial amount of funds coming their way each month.

That is called a sticky post

Great idea! I think Lemmy and kbin could do with plugin systems, so instances could easily add something like this and other instance specific features if they want to.

I’d prefer communities and instances focus on providing clear mission statements, support commitments, community guidelines and working on what is possible with what we have. I’d hope that much of the work being done on the Lemmy code over the coming year or so is cve’s, bugfixes, mod tools, scalability & further integration with other areas of the fediverse.

A financial health bar sounds like a lot of work to add and a lot of work for people running an instance to commit to keeping up to date for little gain, or possibly negative gain. Most businesses struggle to provide accounts every year or two and this would likely involve international market and crypto integration alongside converting donated or removeded hardware, hosting and maybe most importantly labour given freely. Real time financial reports for thousands of open source social instances seems wild. To make a personal instance appear green I’d need to show the running cost of ~3.72% of my server and then donate to my own instance and publish it, even then it might be red for half the month if I don’t get my direct debit date in sync.

A lot of money changing hands on Reddit was mods being bribed to promote content, we’d need a bar for that here too so we can see how corrupt the mods of each instance are. Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.

Prosperity is often linked to abrupt change.

In my experience of open source over the past decade or so often the most reliable projects over the longterm are those with a focus on code & community, not finance. If the finances go too far into the red they will ask the community for support. Pat’s Slackware or Theo’s OpenBSD seems like good examples, they are beyond dependable and the finance model seems to involve ignoring it until the lights are about to go off and then asking the community for help. Gentoo & Debian for the community approach.

A small instance with a dedicated admin and a solid community behind the admin that’s currently losing money may be more likely to be still growing and thriving in a few years than a huge instance at the moment with an admin focused on the short term financial possibilities of another mass Reddit migration next week.