I had an idea that I wanted to run by people that are more familiar with lemmy and decentralized hosting. I’ve run it by some people I know but they don’t have the familiarity with the fediverse to have it easily explained. The idea is not fully fleshed out so would love any sort of criticism or refinement this group could offer! And, apologies if i’m describing something that’s been discussed to death or been done before.
What if servers came with their own currencies/tokens and ledger?
When an admin hosts a server they get a pool of currency that they can issue out, either as “karma” or in exchange for fiat currency to fund server hosting. For smaller servers this currency could be disregarded, but as servers grow and become more relevant in the greater fediverse, the currency/karma could grow to be valuable.
This “Currency” would be transferable to any other member of a server in any amount - as karma, in exchange for services, or whatever.
Additionally, the currency could be used for voting, maybe on admin teams or moderation policies. These could all be at the discretion of the host. I believe it would be best that the admin team has full control of the currency and the ledger but haven’t ironed all that out yet.
This would encourage a number of valuable behaviors:
- Users would be encouraged to enrich their local communities
- Servers would be encouraged to moderate their servers so their currency is viewed as valuable by other communities
- Funding of servers by the user base is a bit like equity - you buy in to a server but anyone is free to treat the currency as meaningless or as gold
- Bad actor servers currency would be meaningless and irrelevant. If a host is acting in bad faith, the users with no stakes can freely migrate to another server. Ones with a stake can pressure the host to cut it out.
To take it to a mid developed system, I see users of prominent servers with large shares of the currencies as being valuable - they either started the community or were important to its establishment. If I see a post on a programming thread from a user who has 15% of currency of a prominent Computer discussion server, I may choose to value their opinion more heavily. Or not, but more info is always better I think.
In a late stage system, assuming I’m not overlooking something, I really feel like this would be an awesome place to be.
Hey, I like that we’re throwing ideas out about how to make the fediverse better. But as someone that develops software in the enterprise and works with product management, putting on my user hat here my first question would be: What problems does this solve for? Upvotes/downvotes and moderation weed out bad actors and highlight good responses. You can paypal/venmo/zelle/even send crypto to donate to server hosts pretty easily.
Personally, I’m not interested in anything having to do with a ledger or currency. Keep web3 dead and buried where it belongs. Isn’t voting with currency for the community just a DAO? And we’ve seen how sideways those go. Not everything has to be a stock market/casino.
And more currency doesn’t mean better responses or more valuable content. We see this with money in politics, where those with the most currency get to be the loudest voices and push their agenda the most. That doesn’t mean they are pushing quality or fact.
But I am curious about starting with the problem first rather than the solution. What do we see as something needing to be addressed? What would an acceptable outcome look like? Once those are defined, then look to what solution best fits.
Yes, I did skip right to a “solution”
I came to the currency idea because of problems I foresee in Lemmy, some of them may be alleviated by other methods but I’ll outline below. And I’m new to this fediverse stuff so if I am misinterpreting something I’d appreciate being corrected!
- Ownership and Community - Servers are owned by their hosts and moderator team. I am a part of a server but have no real connection to the other members. Sharing, finding content, meeting new people is rewarding, but I don’t need to find that in my local community currently. Users will gravitate towards more established servers - essentially coercing centralization of content. I think this problem is maybe unexpected as I’ve seen concern over fracturing (duplication) of content.
- Moderation - There is no strong incentive for good governance of servers. Servers are free to allow bots to register or allow bad faith actors. They may be blacklisted, but this isn’t sustainable. Eventually I expect we’ll see (if not already) pockets of isolated servers that may be cross federated, but closed off to the open fediverse because it is too easy for poorly moderated servers to affect open servers. If a server wants to be taken seriously, they need to moderate and filter their userbase seriously.
- Governance - back to #1, Servers are owner by their hosts - if a community disagrees with moderation or actions by the owners, you put up or get out. This guarantees that servers can not operate in perpetuity, and certainly not in a fair way.
- Retention - There is no incentive to keep a server up. If I get tired of paying for my server, why wouldn’t I just shut it down and register on a unique server?
Sorry I did end up solutioning a bit in those problems but I tried to keep it short.
For what would be an acceptable outcome -
- Servers should have incentives in place to build their own community, outside the Fediverse
- Servers should have incentives in place to moderate, filter, and even cull their user base (based on that servers Moderation and Governance policies)
- Servers should have incentives in place to encourage perpetuity, and easy transfer of ownership
