I’m just one person here, if this gains traction I’m gonna need some help with moderation and administration. Keeping this open to discuss the future possibilities!

  • thilo@lemmyrs.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I would suggest a subscription model (a €$ a month or so) to finance the Server and give the mods some compensation, maybe this is offensive, I don’t know

    • Vorpal@lemmyrs.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Many of us probably don’t need this enough that we pay for it. I could get by with just rust weekly newsletter for the news. Then there is the official forums if I need to ask a question. The main use I got out of r/rust (and now am hoping to get out of this) is reading and learning interesting things, perhaps answering a few questions along the way. Not critical enough to for me to pay for it.

      This is in a sense a sad state of affair. But you are probably never going to get enough critical mass to build a community if you paywall it. All websites that use some form of paywall that I can think of started out free to build that critical mass.

      An optional subscription though could be something. Maybe you get a special marker at your name as a bragging right that you are a supporter? A star next to threads you start? Something like that. Several sites pulled of that model (two comes to mind immediately: twitch, phornix (a linux news website)). LWN.net (also a linux news website, more in-depth though) is an interesting example: it paywalls it main articles for a week, then they go open. Again, it didn’t start out that way though.

      I don’t know if the underlying software supports optional subs though, another option could be a simple paypal tipjar or patreon, but you likely wouldn’t get as much that way.