CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨deadsuperhero@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

https://wedistribute.org/2025/08/introducing-crowdbucks/

This was initially demoed at FediCon 2025, but CrowdBucks is an open source, self-hostable fundraising system that allows people to financially support one another. You use your existing Fediverse account to hold a fundraiser, and can also donate to other people’s fundraisers as well. The form factor is kind of similar to Kickstarter or Patreon.

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lime@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
tl;dr: it uses stripe

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- deadsuperhero@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Support for other providers is coming. Bandwagon is in a similar situation. The overall goal is to support a multitude of options, so that no one payment solution has a monopoly.
  
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- birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  What is Stripe?
  
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  - WanderingThoughts@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    The company that’s involved with the payment disputes between Steam, MasterCard, banks, 18+ games and Collective Shout. Stripe is the one handling payments between Steam and MasterCard. It got blamed, blamed others in return and suddenly is known to a lot more people but not in a good way.
    
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  - poplargrove@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Payment provider. Stripe.com
    
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fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Sweet so now we have OpenCollective, Librepay, and now CrowdBucks. All kind of filling different roles it seems. On going orgnization funding (with transparency as a goal), patronige of a project/group you support (with ease as a goal), and now fundraising (which is generally a limited time activity).

Am I comparing them all pretty well here? Or is there anythjng im missing?

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rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
We really need to figure out the payment system for the fediverse.... Good to see something trying things.

When I put Stripe integration into PieFed I had absolutely zero donations through there, meanwhile my Patreon and Librepay had dozens of dollars in donations. Dozens!

People really really didn't want to donate directly, for some reason. So I disabled the Stripe option.

Instead, Patreon takes 8% and their only payout method is Paypal so Paypal takes a percentage (5%?) and then when I transfer it to my bank from Paypal there's a currency conversion so they take another 5%? and then I pay tax on whatever remains...

I wish CrowdBucks better luck than I had.

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- otter@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  On our donation page, we put a breakdown of how much each platform takes from the donation and I think that is why a lot of users chose to donate through the methods that have lower / no fees: fedecan.ca/en/donate
  
  I imagine as Crowdbucks develops, they will introduce more methods and improve user / platform choice. Dealing with payment platforms is annoying, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with over time
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    That's really nicely done, good work!
    
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  - GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    It also helps that Canada has a non-fee option that only has the downside of being traceable.
    
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- Olap@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  So as much as I dislike crypto, it is basically built to be enshitification proof. And hence a good fit for the fediverse. But I wouldn’t want to touch the crypto ecosystem with a ten foot pole, nevermind a lemmy/mastodon integration
  
  Which leaves us at the behest of traditional payment processors, and they are all faceless conglomerates who care not for anyone. Meaning we’re fucked there too
  
  Maybe we should instead not bring transactions to the fediverse
  
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  - drspod@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    How much are the gas fees these days?
    
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- wiki_me@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  lemmy indicates clearly liberapay is preferred . and it does seem to have an effect because patreon donations went down at some point while liberapay donations went up.
  
  With that said liberapay fees are cited as being around 3.1% and maybe higher. some digital currencies are almost free (nano, ripple) and despite the hate you see i don’t see a rational reason not to offer them as an option.
  
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- Microw@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  People are lazy, that'd be my explaination for why they'd use Patreon
  
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- skribe@piefed.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Haven't PayPal just drastically cut the number of currencies they'll deal in? I haven't used Stripe. Are they similarly impaired?
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Stripe has an amazing amount of currencies for payouts and accepts all kinds of payment methods, really really comprehensive. Pretty low fees too. Simple API and great great docs. They're all good.
    
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hansemilla@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Why not GNU Taler?

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- deadsuperhero@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Actually, there’s a pretty decent possibility of this happening! Ben from Bandwagon is currently looking into this for the underlying Emissary platform. If it proves easy enough to integrate, there’s literally no reason not to.
  
  Proving it in one project might see adoption across similar efforts.
  
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- maxmalrichtig@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Yeah, good question.
  
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squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
From their website

From people you know

CrowdBucks is created by individual people you know, and not a large face-less corporation

And yet, there are no people shown on the website. How do I do know if I know these people?

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Tiuku@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
How does this compare to Liberapay? It’s already opensource and quite good.

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Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I’ve said it before, I think there’s money in a service that crowd funds open source donations.

I use so much FOSS that making sure they all get some money is a real first world problem. If I can only give £10 that month what do I do? Rotate who gets the tenner? Give everyone £.20? Then you have to figure out how each service wants funding and organise that.

Instead I could go to FOSSfund select all the software I use and donate £x. That money gets divvyed up and stored with other people’s donations until a threshold is reached.

When enough money is accrued the service makes a substantial donation. The FOSSfund itself is funded through interest gained while holding donations.

Of course I am a naive user that wants good things to exist and has no idea the difficulties in making them happen. Brb, off to vibecode a payment system. I forsee no problems. I will not be taking questions or feedback at this time.

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- rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I think https://liberapay.com/ does that?
  
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  - Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Holy-shit it does!!! I couldn’t find any of the main repos I want to donate too: Pi-Hole, jellyfin/seerr, *arr, immich. I guess that’s an outreach problem? Getting PromoFaux (Pi-Hole) onto librapay. Pledges seem to help with that.
    
    But Lemmy, Syncthing and Vaultwardern is in in there. I have a tonne of services using MySQL, it’s in there.
    
    Thank you kind stranger, my bank acct hates you.
    
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- GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Remember, Passw0rd1! is a handy filler, meets most password requirements, and is a strong password!
  
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  - Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    ‘Hunter2’ Was my original plan, yours is much better with a special charachter, thank you.
    
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KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Just curious: would any of this be able to circumvent or prevent this unspeakable crime:

Gofundme cancels accounts of Palestinians: mastodon.social/@daliamohisen/115060399174567486

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AntiBullyRanger@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

similar to Kickstarter or Patreon.

Favoritism Ho!

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