Then limit rewards to posts. And I specifically did not mention a subscription service for that reason.

Yes but to put myself in the shoes of your average social media user - a donation just disappears, although you get the warm fuzzy feeling for doing so. Buying rewards actually gives something (albeit very small) in return so we can show our appreciation towards others who are creating quality content

To expand on the idea:

Ideally this would incentivize devs who are hesitant about the cost of hosting to spin up a server, bringing us more instance options and helping to further decentralize the platform.

Right now fedi relies on donations, and it seems to be working, but at some point the growth could outpace the donations leading to large instances shutting down. Rewards on Reddit are dumb as shit cause they feed an amoral corporation, but on Lemmy they would directly support those who are lending their time, money, and expertise to the growth of the fediverse.

Cringe. Host your own server and run it however you want.

Memmy caps out at 10 (including parent comment) based on the team building comment thread. Is that the case in a browser?