Cosmetics.
Let’s offer paid cosmetics for users of your instance. Animated or custom banners, posts, new themes, etc.
It’s a model that works really well for Discord and League of Legends. Instances offering to sell aesthetic luxury to their user base could work for Mastodon too.
It’s non-invasive, it’s optional, it’s a great addition for some people, and it allows to raise funds to keep the hosted instances up and running.
Do you think it’s viable?
Oh man, you just got people’s pitchforks out
I am going to say I agree… to some extent. Misskey saw this and they introduced measures to allow ad hosting and such.
I’m not necessarily saying ads should be it **(**I hate ads myself), but if they are, we can certainly foster communities where the ads are from community members only? (they can advertise products, services for their community. Not without mod approval of course)
This could give admins complete control on wether their servers have or do not have ads.
BUT,
I think perks are a much nicer way.
Last I checked, the roadmap mentioned a paid accounts feature being explored.
I think what you are advising will be the direction mastodon takes with that.
The intent I am sure is NOT a monetization only deal, I’m sure it is intended to be optional and to support instances.
My thing is if we are going to have such a feature, why not allow rewarding the end user with some perks?
I think misskey allows admins to define user storage limits, and supporters get more right? Im love the sound of that. It helps prevent any 1 user from hogging up tons of storage, rewards those who support you.
I agree that allowing paid accounts and rewarding these users is a good thing.
Now as far as if an admin is profiting or not, we need a system kind of like open collective, or a crypto wallet (hear me out).
I would be more than happy with my user’s paid funds going into some sort of holding that all users can check at any given time.
I have a BTC address listed on my instance. It doesn’t have much, but it has more than enough to cover about 4 months of payments should anything ever happen to me.All my end users can clearly see the address, have access to a website to check it, and for those familiar you know damn well you can see all transactions publicly on this wallet, so I can’t lie and pull money out without it being trackable.
I do need to see how opencollective works though because one downside for my current method is my other admin will need to pull funds whereas open collective I think allows people to pay in and they pay the host?
Something like this would be ideal imo