Potential Decentralized Fediverse Alternative to Ko-fi, Patreon, etc.?

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Teknevra@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

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.

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Comments

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bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
How would you do that? You need some party to accept and hold the money and be able to give it out. And those usually have to follow a bunch of regulations.

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- Teknevra@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  What about something like the Lightning Network, similar to NOSTR’s Zaps approach?
  
  Or perhaps Decentralized Finance (DeFi)?
  
  __
  
  odeum.io/…/patreon-alternative-breakdown-what-are…
  
  cryptoforinnovation.org/5-companies-empowering-co…
  
  openware.com/…/the-impact-of-decentralized-financ…
  
  bankofcanada.ca/…/staff-analytical-note-2023-15/?…
  
  nostr.how/en/zaps
  
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network
  
  academy.binance.com/…/what-is-lightning-network
  
  forbes.com/…/bitcoins-lightning-network-what-it-i…
  
  www.investopedia.com/…/lightning-network.asp
  
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  - hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I suppose you can wrtie your bitcoin address into your bio and that's already possible. Otherwise, it'd need some form of plugin to be supported. And how many people own bitcoins and have a wallet installed on the device they're using for social media and are willing to donate here and there?
    
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hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think we all know micropayment, donation etc is a nice thing to have. But it's really hard to become a payment provider. When handling money for other people, you'll face fraud, disputes. You need to do proper accounting. you're liable. You need to register a company, you need a legal department etc.

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- z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yeah I can see that. It needs to be centralized due to just the nature of, y’know, nation state backed currencies, and crypto ultimately is too vulnerable to becoming a centralized power structures to be taken seriously as an alternative to national currencies.
  
  My only interest in this is whether or not Patron, KoFI, etc. Can still provide their services at the level they already are, but way cheaper (I.e. give a higher percentage back to the creators). I know its somewhat low currently, but is it as low as possible?
  
  Just something I occasionally think about.
  
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  - hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Hmmh, what's their current platform fee? I'd say somewhere between 0% to 5% sounds alright. Depending on what kinds of features they offer. The minimum is probably somewhere around what Stripe takes. If you want to offer credit cards and convenience...
    
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demesisx@infosec.pub ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I stand behind this idea 100%.

I’m sorry you have to start from such a defensive place about the crypto aspect of this idea. Don’t let hivemind anti-crypto people get you undermining or apologizing for your vision. It is the right way to do decentralized finance.

Most people would recommend ETH or BTC but I’d actually recommend you stay away from ETH because of the inherent non-determinism of the accounts model.

Full disclosure: I might be slightly biased since I moderate Cardano’s communities on Lemmy but, if you want the stability of BTC’s UTxO with smart contracts, I’d recommend Cardano. Decentralized in most every way including governance, fully open source, and utterly parallelizable (due to the UTxO nature of it).

You should also consider BTC or Monero if you don’t absolutely need smart contracts. But don’t let the investor moonbois get you using ETH or Solana. They’re both incredibly flawed and most likely unfixable (in ETH’s case because of nondeterminism and in Solana’s case because of centralization).

Good luck!

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Chocrates@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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solrize@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
@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 and anti-money-laundering. 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.

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- imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  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 the two paradigms is just mind-boggling to me.
  
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  - solrize@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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- Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
  ~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~licens~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
  
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  - solrize@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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- Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - solrize@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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  - Blaze@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    
    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
    
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manicdave@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
A lot of crypto projects are ready for implementation right now, but they all have their own unique problems and one rather large shared problem.

I made a peertube plugin a while back that will tip XNO to any creators you watched based on watch time.

The user journey for everyone was as simple as could possibly be imagined. Viewers added a few quid to a browser wallet and forget about it. Creators added an XNO address to the video description and the plugin would automatically pay like 10p a minute or something. Nobody even needed an account to make it work and there was no issues with federation as long as you were watching from the instance with your wallet.

I’ve even been writing my own fedi-first blog engine and been thinking about adding paywalls. It’d be super easy to do technically and the UX would be as good or better than any existing services.

You’d just set a cookie when people look at a post and generate a new wallet on the server. If a reader wants to view a paywalled post, they click a link or scan a QR code to send payment, the payment clears in two seconds and refreshes the page. Server checks the cookie and that the new wallet has the fee in, sees the article is paid for and serves it.

The thing is that this project is targeting a niche within a niche within a niche within a niche.

The deepest niche is why XNO? It has JS wallets, is feeless, actually decentralised, clears within two seconds and the project leader seems to be ideologically driven to create a functional currency above all else. The problems are that it’s not anonymous, it’s premined, and that it’s deflationary.

Already this is a hard niche to get out of. I can already see that people will be arguing to use alternatives like monero because it’s more secure, but it also has fees, is difficult to exchange for real currency and will probably get you on a no fly list. Or SOL because the fees are really low and a lot of people already use it. But I’m wanting to do instant transactions with no fees so sending pennies is feasible, so this makes me a statist spy wants to push my shitcoin because I’m a massive bag holder.

The next niche is that we have a small user base here that’s incredibly sceptical about crypto. The whole crypto sphere is incredibly toxic. It’s mostly environmentally destructive and the vast majority of what it holds up is fraud, organised crime and gambling.

The majority of pro-crypto people here are cypherpunks who put their ideological commitment to monero or bitcoin above usability. The majority of anti-crypto -and overall majority- of people here are jaded by crypto nonsense and won’t give a new project a hearing.

The next niche is marketing. We don’t do that here. It’s uncouth and immoral. A spam campaign would be annoying and get the spammers banned and is just generally bad in everyway. Alternatively if any of the influencers on here decided to sell out to help us reach a critical mass where crypto payments aren’t entirely stagnant, we wouldn’t have the money to pay them. Crypto kind of has to be unprofitable to move on from being another form of gambling.

The last niche is onboarding. The market we want for microtransactions really isn’t the market that centralised exchanges want. A decentralised payments network really should be competing with netflix and substack. We want high churn, low volume for people to be able to feasibly make an income. That’s going to be ruined by the fact that people wanting to pay a tenner a month are going to lose most of that money before they even get it into a wallet, and the people recieving that money might just lose 20% of it at any given moment due to market movements.

So after narrowing it all down this leaves us with maybe a dozen people on here left to support it but they aren’t even going to cross paths enough to make any transactions.

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- hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Hey XNO bro, I thought it was the perfect token for what you were talking about.
  
  I jave a bunch of XNO, any creatives taking them ? Might as well “gift” them away.
  
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  - manicdave@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Maybe I’ll actually get round to implementing my ideas 🤷
    
    I guess there’s no harm in making it work even if nobody uses it.
    
    I know the peertube one is sorta broken at the minute because the WASM POW script doesn’t accept difficulty as a variable. Maybe I should check up and see if anyone has fixed it.
    
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hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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 ?

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blackfire@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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pelespirit@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It could be done with GNU Taler. There is 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 at least 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 payments and donations.

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AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Sub.club seems similar to your description, though it shut down recently.

theverge.com/…/sub-club-mastodon-mammoth-fedivers…

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jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The answer is crypto and will always be crypto, specifically Monero.

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woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
SEPA money transfers directly onto the bank account.

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brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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- limer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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
  
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breadcat@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
put xmr in bio

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