Sure, we have open source, federated replacements for Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube. How do we get creators to use this stuff? One consideration involves the ability to pay for things.

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.

  • chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    15 hours ago

    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.