They need to add paid awards with some split for Lemmy development and the instance. That was the reason people bought into Reddit gold. It was a good faith, fund the platform thing.

Awards would only work for people on your own instance though. Pushing them across instances is difficult. If they're free, they become worthless and defeat the purpose. And passing money between instances is stupidly complicated. I guess you'd have to go to the instance in order to buy the award there. Which gives people an incentive to run their own instance. I'd hope that wouldn't make servers too small. As much as people seem to like the idea of many, many small instances federated, I think the system works best with several large instances than a million small ones.

I guess it's complicated.