I had an idea I wanted to run by the #QOTO community. Not sure if I love it or hate it personally so could really use some feedback.

We have several services here that can be very expensive in terms of storage costs, things like NextCloud, FunkWhale, PeerTube, are quickly getting to the terrabyte range.

Right now we give a small but generous quota for free on all our servers. Usually enough to play with, 1 - 10 gigs as a starting point. We have more than enough funding for many years into the future to be able to give several people much higher quotas, even a terrabyte a person would be doable if it werent too many users.

Problem is if we just open it up to the public and give everyone a high quota it wouldn't take long before the costs would be overwhelming. Especially considering that many of those users wont be contributing to the QOTO community and may just use the space for personal storage only. Thats fine, but we need a better way to figure out who to give a higher quota, some way to earn it.

Obviously QOTO is a non-profit so charging users is out of the question. So we need a better way. I had an idea to make it reward based.

Basically QOTO reward people if they have been on the server and active for a certain amount of time. Create "tiers" based on how long an account was registered and how many posts they have made as qualifications for each tier.

Also no need for it to be limited to qoto mastodon either. We can actually use the the user trust-levels on discourse (which are calculated automatically based on post history) as another measure. Each Discourse trust level gets you a new tier of quota allowances.

This should reward QOTO engagers and content creators to create meaningful content and give us a way to ration out our server resources.