I dont expect a decentralised platform to be profitable and also think donations are better than in-app purchases.

But I dont want big instances to suddenly turn off because they cant afford it anymore or the development being behind so much we loose users to missing features.

Looking at the donation pages of lemmy instances there are enough donations for now but it is good to have a plan B for in case we get flooded by users not willing to donate so this platform survives long term. That plan B should be as least Invasive as possible,so no ads,analytics or paywall. Thats why I suggested something that is completely cosmetic.

The hard truth is that long term, we likely need another way besides donations to keep the ecosystem alive.

There is a reason many YouTubers sell discord roles. Many people are willing to spend 5€/month for a stupid discord rank, so I don’t see why it’s wrong to profit of people willing to buy awards

If you prefer direct donation, having something like awards won’t stop you but if someone wants to buy that overpriced sticker, they can as well.

I can understand the mindset, but I worry most people don’t think like this.

The thing is, that small rewards for “donations” will likely make the people much more willing to spend money in the first place. Even if it’s as small as a sticker on someone else’s post that costs the servers involved like a handful of API calls. But when a 1€ award is 3x as popular as the 1€ donation, it will greatly increase the funds available to the instance and, hence better servers, more features etc