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- cross-posted to:
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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.
Not “Big Capitalism” commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.
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Bro, I can’t even get people to watch a video that isn’t YouTube or Instagram. I PAY money to host these videos. Absolutely no one is going to commercialize the fedi.
Hard pass on the core concept here. I’m really enjoying a community of people just posting because they want to, it’s like the internet I grew up with and loved. Why would would you want to bring in people trying to squeeze a buck out of that? Growth isn’t an inherently good thing
Or: maybe we can just keep paid influencer scams off the fediverse entirely? IMHO we don’t need or want paid content creators here. As soon as someone can make a buck from it, the entire network will be flooded with clickbait, AI generated posts, and worse.
Surely the ability to pay for things exists already in many forms/platforms.
But one thing that’s missing is central financing from the platform itself. The “big tech” is running wild with advertising money and this is what fuels the rapid growth.
Things like Nebula seem to work (creator owned business that offers paid subscriptions), but I’m not sure how many Nebula-exclusive creators there are, I have a feeling most of them publish stuff on YouTube as well.
Mastodon and Lemmy communities work on donations, but most of them just trundle along barely covering hosting costs.
I guess, in theory, it would be possible to create a PeerTube/Loops server that monetizes everything with ads, but I’m a bit skeptical of that unless you have very deep start-up VC money behind you to get you off the ground.
We’ve had micropayment/-donation sites like Flattr, but it never took off for real.
I think the core problem is trying to make people to pay for the content/service/membership. Most don’t. I don’t think that would change even if the option was integrated into platforms.
Nebula is invite only, I can’t upload my videos to it.
The closest we had to this was blockchain web 3.0 and that was a complete trash.
Adding a stripe or PayPal panel to your fediverse thingy really doesn’t structurally change anything about e-commerce.
1000s of small instances individually dealing with Mastercard doesn’t sound like a good time for anyone.
And other than that there’s just more localized payment standards. Maybe that’s fine but there’s reason SEPA isn’t even dominating e-commerce within Europe. From a customer side it’s a vastly different experience store to store, and in most cases not a good one. It’s also not nearly as easy to integrate into an online store as stripe.
On a less negative note, watch what zkat is building. They started something during the itchio debacle. I’m not super optimistic how much can be done in regards to commerce without addressing payment but maybe they see some path I don’t see.
