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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1239521
Reddit used to have something similar to health bar showing how much "gold" was bought to support the website. but later on out of greed they started using it as a paywall.
We can have a health bar that doesnt paywall ANY features and very transparently displays funds raised\used for a server. It can be used to display how much funds its being supported, how much server costs are, salaries for open source maintainers, mods, etc.
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.
How is that supposed to work, though?
Like, say I'm wildly corrupt and taking money to push stories about Smurfs. Big Gargamel sends me $1K a month to use my influence to seed stories that talk negatively about the Smurfs. I don't say shit. Big Gargamel doesn't say shit. How would the "undeclared funding" bar know?
Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it's bulletproof.
Ah. Of course. People will declare the undeclared money they receive.
You've got it!
People just won't lie about ill gotten gains, tax returns or funding on lemmy instances. The green bar will be truth.