@dansup Sorry but definitely no, it goes against a philosophy of decentralization and free software. I am happy to volunteer contributions, not to pay a fee to a central authority. Just my pick, sorry if I sound harsh but it's definitely against my principles.
@dansup I believe a better option would be premium hosting. Basically allow users of #Pixelfed to host content under their own domain, & you could throw in the checkmark as a bonus. 😉
Similar to how @matt provides premium hosting to #WriteFreely via Write.as & @photomatt provides premium #WordPress hosting via WP.com (are there any other examples‽).
It would benefit the community plus encourage other hosts to take a second look at Pixelfed.
@dansup I’d prefer to have the option of a general subscription, where one option is being able to have some kind of symbol denoting I was a paid user. Let’s not conflate payment with “verification”, and be explicit about what it entails for content visibility or promotion.
Also if companies see a Fedi developer is willing to “sip their own wine” (I hate the phrase “eating your own dog food”) by offering premium #Pixelfed hosting, it might encourage more brands & companies to embrace Pixelfed as a backup to #Instagram (just in case #Meta suspends or silences accounts).
The added bonus is that I suspect it would open up Pixelfed to organisations (Art galleries? Universities? Museums? Design studios? Large nonprofits?) that might want to spin up their own instance, have the funds to do so, but perhaps not necessarily the technical expertise.
@dansup looking at your profile I already see verification checkmarks for your pixelfed, GitHub, and website links. Adding a way to vary that checkmark to indicate paid support, or just to customize and give hosts the option to charge a fee for customization, could be a nice way for supporters to make that public that would be hard to fake
@dansup I would like not the "verification" but just the ability to get the visual "App Support Badge" next to your profile. And it must be available and possible to pay through other clients if their devs want to implement the feature and not only main Pixelfed client
@dansup I’m not a fan of this for three reasons: Being centralised goes against the very nature of the fediverse and leaves it open to bad actors. There’s already a successful verification system as used by Mastodon. At the very least it will cause confusion. These paid verification systems don’t really verify you only show that you’ve paid.