When instances get older, they can become harder to maintain due to storage and high usage issues with risks of donations drying up.
When instances get older, they can become harder to maintain due to storage and high usage issues with risks of donations drying up.
This idea would be for creators we don’t currently have, using features we don’t currently have, serving an audience that is not currently on the fediverse. It takes a bit of imagination. A ton of Substack writers absolutely hate sharing a platform with nazis and would jump if there was an alternative.
Substack has $45 million in revenue (and Substack writers earned $450 million), this year. People are willing to pay.
I feel like people usually just premium-lock their content behind patreon and other similar services.
Those don’t federate.
Yeah I know. But I mean people would just post whatever media they have made onto threads here, or whatever the site is, and people would have to subscribe to the Patreon or buy it to see it.
Yep, could be. Thing is we want the payment to happen on PieFed so we can skim 5% off the top (Substack takes 10%). But doing that in a federated way is something I have no idea where to begin with… We can’t trust remote instances when they claim someone has already paid, there needs to be a way to verify the payment. So, a big shared ledger of some kind, but decentralised because fedi, sooo there’s blockchain/crypto again.
I suppose I can come up with a few (technical, but unfeasible) solutions without a global ledger. For example users have accounts/wallets with their own (trusted) instance. And then the instances handle the asymetric cross-instance cash flow and batch it up alike a big Splitwise group. The instance admins could then write bank transfers to balance it out at the end of a month. I think that’d be an idea that aligns with how the Fediverse is laid out. And regular signatures would suffice. Unfortunately it requires every instance to become a bank. With all the legalities involved, so it’s completely unfeasible.
If we rely on crypto too much, we might as well say goodbye to a few more Fediverse ideas and store the user accounts, ownership of communities, responsibility etc in the ledger as well and turn into one of the crypto communications platforms. But they’re already there and we’re not them.
I believe all of this has already been discussed in conjunction with PeerTube. They’ve been looking into paying content creators and how to pay for storage. Framasoft seems to refuse to hire accountants, lawyers and do all the work needed to handle money. So what they do is provide the users with a free-form text area in their channels, so the users bring their own payment methods. But none of that is tied into the platform, it’s just optional donations and a text field that gets displayed to the viewers.
I like the idea behind GNU Taler, that’s a decentral online payment system without crypto. But it’s not there yet. More academical as of today, though they have some cooperations with banks and try to make it happen. Still needs some entities (banks) to be in charge of the money, though.