Hey everyone,
I was curious on whether anyone has ever thought about potentially introducing a Fediverse equivalent to platforms like:
- Ko-fi
- Patreon
- Gumroad
- LiberaPay
- Buy Me a Coffee
- Web Monetization (e.g., Coil)
etc.
What I’m imagining is a decentralized platform that allows users across the Fediverse to directly tip or support creators, all without relying on plugins or third-party integrations.
For instance, I know that creators on platforms like PeerTube can add plugins for cryptocurrency or payment solutions, but these require additional configuration or technical know-how.
What I’m suggesting is a straightforward tipping platform built directly into the Fediverse ecosystem, one that doesn’t depend on plugins—just a seamless way to support creators on ALL Fediverse platforms.
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To clarify upfront:
- I am NOT a “crypto bro.” I’m not here to promote any cryptocurrency or blockchain agenda—I’m just thinking about user-friendly, decentralized solutions.
- While I AM open-minded about crypto-based approaches, I feel there’s potential for a non-crypto, user-first Fediverse tipping system.
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What do you all think?
- Has this idea been explored?
- Are there any projects in the works that aim to address this?
- Do you think it’s feasible or even a good fit for the Fediverse ethos?
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I’d love to attempt something like this myself, but sadly I personally lack the time, technical knowledge, and energy to make it happen.
Still, I’d be really curious to hear the community’s thoughts.
Thanks in advance for sharing your insights.
At its core, it would be a matter of having a place that accepts credit cards and a place that distributes it. You would have to have a back end like Paypal or Stripe or some sort of crypto that not everyone has. Also, crypto has to have a place that accepts and distributes, so you would need some kind of exchange. This seems easy on its surface, but I think it would be difficult in the end to take it completely out of the big corporation’s hands.
I think this is kind of what crypto is supposed to solve. All of those platforms have to have a relationship with a payment processor and that means they may not compatible across instances. A federated space to share and display crypto wallets could do it maybe. But I don’t understand crypto really and feel like the current incarnations are scams.
To much regulatory oversite needed I’d siggest to make ot work outside of the paid solutions.
When i was first interested in the issie this seemed the perfect use case for crypto, fast foward 5 years and it still seems that way.
I’d suggest XNO but maybe there is something else ?
It could be done with GNU Taler. There are even some NLnet funded grants for open-source projects to integrate it.
The fediverse app would need to implement a relatively basic frontend and someone would need to host a so called merchant backend that multiple people could share to collect funds.
The main show stopper is the final bank integration, but it looks like there will be some options in the EU starting mid of 2025. Basically you will be able to make a SEPA bank transfer to charge your GNU Taler wallet (you can use an open-source mobile app or a browser plugin for that) and then you can use these funds to make micro-payments and donations.
Sub.club seems similar to your description, though it shut down recently.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/16/24322574/sub-club-mastodon-mammoth-fediverse-shutting-down
Maybe we’re overthinking this.
What if it was a front-end for, like, Google or Apple Pay, PayPal, and other centralized financial services?
So basically, the “Fediverse” part is the account, UI, integration with other Fediverse apps, but ultimately it does not hold any financial information or perform any transactions. All it does is conveniently connect donors to creators better, and more flexibly, than a bare “here’s my PayPal’ link.
There is a long list of things those payment services will not do, and reliance on any of them makes a federated service a polite fiction, forcing each set of server admins to enforce and ban many things on the possibility it could shut them down .
It can only work with untraceable crypto, and even then we are back to the illegal market strategy, and why those markets are in the dark web, with most of them doing exit scams
I think the question is why. You have librapay or open collective. I think the requirements for finncial services put too big a burden on doing it and there are already established solutions for it.
SEPA money transfers directly onto the bank account.
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put xmr in bio
@Teknevra, you’ve posted a number of ideas like this which seem based on the premise that all it would take to make them happen is writing the software and keeping the servers running. In fact those are really the easy parts.
Any above-ground platform involving user to user payments (Patreon, Paypal etc.) has to devote a ton of energy into anti-fraud, anti-money-laundering, trade in illegal goods, etc. AO3 isn’t just file hosting for fanfiction, it’s explicitly political in that it aims to give a safe space for works that would be banned on other platforms due to subject matter that draws disapproval. That takes a lot of ideological commitment and some level of moderation, legal backing, etc. Pulling non-fediverse sites into the fediverse when they desire to run their own walled gardens for whatever reasons is another set of battles to fight. So in each case, the obstacles to your idea involve conflicts between humans, not just lack of the right software.
Why do you find the fediverse so great anyway? Lemmy is basically a failure IMHO. Instead of having one giant jerk censoring things like on Reddit, there are instead dozens of little petty ones wanting to defederate from other instances. Reddit is mostly a superior experience for users, with just a few of us fringe types staying on Lemmy because of priorities that almost nobody else cares about. Mastodon gained some popularity when Twitter became an intolerable hellhole, but Bluesky ended up recapturing a lot of those departing users.
I appreciate your good intentions and willingness to help out with various annoying situations, but I think it’s important to stay clear-headed about exactly what you are trying to do.
Instead of having one giant jerk censoring things like on Reddit, there are instead dozens of little petty ones wanting to defederate from other instances.
This false equivalency pains me to my core. I don’t really have anything to say about the rest of your comment, but ffs can people stop with this nonsense take? You’re implying that the difference between centralized corporate authoritarianism and decentralized grassroots democracy is negligible.
Lemmy is free and collaborative, reddit is censored and exploitative. The fact that people consistently try to equate two opposite paradigms is just mind-boggling to me.
This false equivalency pains me to my core. I don’t really have anything to say about the rest of your comment, but ffs can people stop with this nonsense take? You’re implying that the difference between centralized corporate authoritarianism and decentralized grassroots democracy is negligible.
It might very well be that the corporate censors are worse human beings than the Lemmy censors. That is completely independent of which platform experiences more censorship. It’s literally against the Lemmy World terms of service to discuss unsanctioned brands of cat food without supplying scientific sources. That nailed Lemmy’s coffin shut for me. There is nothing like that on Reddit. It’s ok, I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me.
You chose to base your accound on lemmy.world. The advantage of federation is that you can live in another server that is more akin to your tastes, while still being able to interact with lemmy.world if you like.
Yes I use lemmy.ml sometimes, but stay mostly on .world by inertia. It doesn’t make much difference. It does matter where the communities are. c/vegan is big and active and it’s on .world. The catfood incident there didn’t affect me directly (I’m not a subscriber) but it affected all the participants, many of whom are on other servers. So it’s not enough for users to move from .world. Communities would have to move or split as well. The federation model is that .world exports its censorship to every server that federates with it.
In fact, community fragmentation is already a huge fediverse fail even without censorship causing even more fragmentation.
Community fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. Your actual complaint isn’t about censorship, but about the small size of the Lemmy userbase. If the userbase was bigger, there would be more active server options, and the moderation of each individual server (such as lemmy.world) wouldn’t matter as much. Ironically, by ignorantly claiming that Lemmy has a problem with censorship, you’re actively working against attempts to grow the userbase.
Not to mention, if your biggest complaint of censorship is that lemmy.world bans discussion of vegan cat food, let me play the world’s smallest violin for you
Sorry, that makes no sense.
Lemmy as a platform has no censorship.
Lemmy.world is one specific server among hundreds that has a little bit of censorship.
It just happens to be the biggest as this moment in time, but that could easily change if they were actually censoring things to any significant extent. It never would have become the biggest in the first place if it were as censorship prone as you seem to believe.
Encounter censorship on Lemmy > move to a different server
Encounter censorship on reddit > nothing you can do
Lemmy is a failure at being like centralized social media, just like I’m a failure at being an athlete. It’s no more built to do that than I am.
I get that many folks around here don’t care for it, but Beehaw is a better model for this space. If people started treating the fedeverse as a Local+ framework, and treated the websites as the fundamental building blocks af the fediverse, and not just weird dangling tails on the ends of things, the experience would be significantly better. But none y’all want to do that, because that means leaving the mental model of centralization at the door.
Lemmy is a failure at being like centralized social media
It’s also a failure at being like Usenet, which was far less centralized than Lemmy. I’m unfamiliar with Beehaw.
Lemmy is basically a failure IMHO.
Reddit is mostly a superior experience for users
If you really think this and don’t think Lemmy will get better then you should be using Reddit instead of Lemmy.
If you really think this and don’t think Lemmy will get better then you should be using Reddit instead of Lemmy.
I explained that Reddit is better for most people, though there is a fringe minority that chooses Lemmy for various idiosyncratic reasons. I’m part of that minority and so are you, ok? That doesn’t make the rest of the world likely to migrate here.
