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.
__
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.
__
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?
__
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.
@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.
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.
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.
[email protected]
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
Defederation is censorship. It’s part of the platform.
Don’t get me wrong, I support defederating from shitty instances, but it’s still a censor deciding what members see.
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.
Some instances do, especially language-focused ones like feddit.org
It’s also a failure at being like Usenet, which was far less centralized than Lemmy. I’m unfamiliar with Beehaw.
If you really think this and don’t think Lemmy will get better then you should be using Reddit instead of Lemmy.
Anti Commercial-AI licens (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
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.