Aside from monetization, I think being able to give people awards/trophies/badges would just be a fun thing. I collected some weird ones on Stackoverflow back in the day.

The idea clearly comes from a good intention, i like rewards in themselves but i dislike the fact that people with more money have more advantages, even slight ones. I admit that this is kind of a moralist take, and that in practice it's what makes some great projects possible via crowdfunding. I also admit that not wanting to encourage user contributions can lead to enterprise/state contribution being necessary or more tempting, which is probably worse. But i disliked that part on Reddit, and i would be a bit disappointed to have it on foss federative projects as well.

Please don't

does PieFed having the classic "cover our monthly hosting costs" progress bar OG reddit used to have?

donating used to give you account gold (which didn't allow you to give awards) but still gave you access to extra features (like saved posts I believe)

since PieFed is open source maybe these could be tied to extra hosting capacity and not paywalling features? ie you donate X amount you get to upload Y amount more images/video to share on the instance?

I'd be weary of being able to pay to give others awards as that allows actors with more capital to sway conversations and astroturf a forum that's supposed to be democratic.

I think it's a good idea and would vote in favor.

Money ruins everything, don't do this.

I'm pro achievement badges. Paid content can come where there are many achievements already.

I suppose the technology to federate it wouldn't be too hard. A badge or award or custom reaction could get federated with the same mechanism we federate a flair or an upvote. I mean ActivityPub is very broad and lenient with things and we rely on mutual trust between instances anyway. I suppose money being involved incentivises people to do weird stuff, but same applies to some political arguments and trolls and we have that somewhat covered.

I mean im fine with it. Its like vanity items with mmos. As long as it does not effect gameplay that is the way to go. I have no problem with people with cash using it to keep the platform healthy and get a bit of bling out of it.

Perhaps as a trial run active users could get 1 Gold, 2 Silver and 3 Bronze rewards per month.