We're commies here. You can have all the gold you need. It can take a couple of years and a bunch of approvals, but eventually you get your piece. You'll need to diy it into the desired shape yourself tho.

For legal reasons this may or may not be a joke.

This is the only gold I can sell🥇 (for legal reasons this is a joke too)

Please enjoy this ~~reddit~~ lemmy silver my good person *tips fedora* (For illegal reasons this is a joke)

I actually think it might be an idea to seriously consider and discuss. I mean, awards and badges of honour are given by many communities, there's no real reason why not to honour someone if they did some much-appreciated thing. It only becomes difficult when the honouring is being done by some questionable "authority". Boils down to, "who would be the authority here?" -- But having (meaningful) badges to give away, and especially if they can be passed on, which are understood as what they are, that is just some electric patterns in computers which we interpret in a certain way, why not. This can be a way of community financing -- see it as wealth redistribution. "So i have some money which i want to put into the community, and i get visibly honoured for it, and i can pass that non-thing on, that's a virtual incentive!"

ah shit...here we go again

Unironically I think some sort of Lemmy Premium feature will need to exist. Currently servers are hosted on goodwill. If Lemmy gets even half as big as Reddit the server costs to instance owners will be astronomical. I think a lot of servers will go under first before Lemmy gets that big. So there needs some cash flow but if it's reliant on donations idk how well that'll go. People will probably just donate to their own home server or the most popular one to keep their communities up. (Also I suppose an instance owner could blackmail the community if they got big enough to like take down 20%+ of Lemmy's use with their shutdown) but with that structure I can see Lemmy becoming homogenized to like 3 servers ran off donations and stuff. Goodwill doesn't pay the Internet bill.

But if Lemmy as an organization did centralize accounts like people are asking them they could do some sort of premium service and dump it into a pool. And then like if a premium member interacts with an instance at all it throws like a fifth of a cent at them for like every upvote/comment/etc. The biggest servers would get most of it but it'd give new servers some incentive to grow and put up compelling content.