Maybe rather than a hard limit on the total number it should be a limit for uploaded images inside a moving time window to discourage removing them from old posts while keeping users partially in check? For example allowing 10 images max uploaded in the window of 15 days. The lower the time window to more it discourages removing images from old posts.

Alternative solutions like getting 1 image slot per day where it caps at 5 slots where removing images older than 1 hour doesn’t recover them also sound interesting. But I feel like they’d encourage using up those slots instead to not “waste” the slots if the slots available were already at max.

Donating to the server could give you additional slots or something.

Regardless of the the potential solutions I agree on not wanting there to be a hard limit on pictures. It just doesn’t make sense for 1 day old and 1 year old accounts to have the same cap on images. There should be something more organic that wouldn’t overwhelm the server but allow the users to still contribute over time without negatively affecting old posts. The users should be allowed to remove uploaded images ofc but that shouldn’t be encouraged sustematically by rewarding it.

Another thing that crosses my mind is not having a limit on the amount of image uploads but instead on the total size of them. This would indirectly encourage users to manage their assigned storage and compress the images by themselves. And when they feel like posting something in good quality with high res they would be able to do that at the cost of giving up the amount of image uploads for the current timeframe.

Those were some ideas that I came up on the spot and hopefully it helps spark some discussion on how things could be approached. And even if it doesn’t I still had fun thinking about it before sleep. The thing that I feel like is urgently needed is a way to passively encourage donations by giving various perks without completely paywalling everything. I have no clue how something like this can be implemented in a way that wouldn’t seem like or allow for instances to become money grabs. For example if the perks required more money than they cost to cover loses caused by free users it could end up in a situation where with enough of perk users a disproportionate amount of money gets directed towards the server past the covering of costs. but that may be actually wanted to sustain the projects past the maintaining of infra and I’m missing the point? What about perks that are shared with the whole instance on certain milestones to give additional reward/perk in the form of thankful community memers? A well funded instance could dynamically allow for more/bigger image uploads and so on. So many possibilities to choose from.

I got unexpectedly lengthful with my response. I intended it to be like ~4-5 shorter than that. Lol