There are issues that have been on my mind for a few days, and I wanted to talk about them with you.
Downvotes
As you may notice, downvotes have been completely off for the last few days. I did this because I couldn't resist the pressure of some friends :/ I still don't know what to do about this. The majority of members probably want it to be completely open. As mods, posters and admins; some think it should be closed, some think it should be restricted (I guess).
I guess there is no solution that makes everyone happy. I realized I don't have admin skills in stressful situations, I'm a fucking stupid lol :D I miss @gabe so much.
lemmyposter212 suggested "fuzzy votes" or something that can work for us too. I think I'll just ghost this issue for a while.
Donations
As you know, all our donation accounts have been closed. Since it was my first time opening a site in the NSFW area, I had no experience. I reviewed some adult donation sites but most of them were shady. Honestly I couldn't trust them.
There are only coins now. But I guess most people don't want to deal with coins. It is because I didn't get any donations about 4 months now :D Those sent from Github Sponsor or Patreon were also returned to donators as well. I received $200-ish donations so far.
We are currently the 2nd largest instance in Lemmy. After lemmy.world, we're bigger than lemmy.ml and lemm.ee! I don't think it will work this way anymore. On an annual basis, I need to spend a month's salary for Lemmy NSFW.
Does anyone have an idea to solve this problem?
First and foremost - thank you for everything you do running lemmynsfw. You're doing an amazing job and I, for one, appreciate it tremendously.
Re: downvotes, I still believe that downvotes open only to community members is the way to go, but I appreciate you're doing what you feel is best and if you think it's genuinely improving things to turn them off entirely, you do what you need to do. I'm willing to be convinced, I truly am, but I haven't been yet. That said, I found a workaround to my biggest problem with it - hiding read posts without voting - so I don't have to upvote things I don't like just to make them go away. With that in place, I can live with it. At the end of the day, I just want to be able to browse without seeing the same posts more than once.
Re: donations, it's truly a shame that you haven't been able to set something up. I was here right at the beginning, and I was a very early donor, because I truly believe that Lemmy needs a dedicated place for NSFW content, I want lemmynsfw (and Lemmy as a whole) to succeed, and I understand how much it costs to host such a place. So I'd be very happy to donate again if you can find a channel. That said, I don't want to have to do so using some sort of cryptocurrency. Not only because, like Lemmy itself, it's not quite there yet in terms of usability, but also because (unlike Lemmy), at the end of the day I find the entire crypto world to be very scammy and shady, rampant with bad actors. Not to mention that Trocador app you linked to elsewhere doesn't seem to handle setting up monthly recurring donations, which is what I'd like to do.
My suggestion would be to investigate Epoch as a payment processor. I have joined multiple porn sites in the past, and they've all used Epoch for their billing, and at least I personally have never had a problem. They seem on the up-and-up to me (but again, I said investigate - please do your own due diligence). What I don't know is if they handle one-time donations, or if they just do monthly billing.
Re: Gallery, I'll be honest I'm not that interested in new UI's for Lemmy. The default UI + TamperMonkey scripts (LemmyTools + Lemmy Keyboard Navigation) work great for me and pretty much reproduce old.reddit on PC, and Sync took me all of 2 or 3 days to adjust to on Android and now I'm cool with it. I think it's wonderful you want to keep contributing to the Lemmy universe, and it's awesome you found someone to help, but just speaking for myself, I'd view this one as pretty low priority.
Once again, thank you. You invest so much time and energy here it's crazy. Hope you get the donation channel issue worked out very soon, so I can start contributing again.
Epoch seemed safe to me too. But they responded as below for "donations":
"Thanks for the email and details. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide processing due to the billing being for donations. We are ok with the NSFW content; however, with our structure with our Acquirer/Bank, our services can not be used for the billing of donations."
Well, then how about this. Make LemmyNSFW a premium service. Anyone on any instances can post, comment, vote, admin, etc on the communities housed here, but if you want to have a user@lemmynsfw.com account you have to pay a $1 a month subscription fee. Then you offer the ability to tip more if you want 😉
This might sound a little extreme at first, but LemmyNSFW really just needs to be a hub for its communities to offer the core value it gives to the greater Lemmyverse. Hosting user accounts is kind of secondary. And having pr0n available is essential for Lemmy as a whole to be a truly viable Reddit replacement. Look at PornLemmy, they've been trying to sell it for the past 4 months and don't seem like they'll be around in the long haul. Some instances allow NSFW communities, but many don't. That's what this instance and it's domain name offer primarily.
I'm not joking, this could be the solution to them preferring subscriptions. In addition to crypto wallets, which you should still have even if some of us are averse to it.
"Trying" is too big of a word. Not caring is more appropriate. If someone wants the site then very good, if not then I don't mind. I've put it in minimal hardware usage mode, and it can coast along for a very long time. However, with how the Lemmy experiment unfolded up to now, PornLemmy will probably not be the only one doing so. Development so far has been like a case study on how wrong things can go when devs go by their own without any functional requirements, software design documents, planning, management, etc.