Ben Pate 🤘🏻
Hey all..
What's the best way to fund a service like #Bandwagon?
I strongly believe that the #Fediverse needs a sustainable funding model to be competitive with BlueSky, Xitter, and Facebook. More than just donations and mutual aid, people should be able to make careers on the Fediverse.
I'm reevaluating how I'll pay for bandwagon.fm in the long term. And I want to make something that's still "free forever"
Do you think there's a place for the #Freemium Fediverse?
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
@mariusor I can’t say for sure. But every interaction I’ve had with them has been positive, and they’re very knowledgeable about getting things done the right way.
Hey @silverpill - how would you describe Mitra’s payment system? What use cases does it support right now?
silverpill
@benpate @mariusor It supports paid subscriptions. Authors can publish posts that are visible only to a subscribers group (usually a subset of followers). Access to that group can be purchased with monero cryptocurrency, or gifted by an author.
Payment can be made either from author's instance web UI, or by sending activities over network. In the latter case, FEP-0837 is used (which only Mitra implements).
I intend to keep it 100% self-hostable, so integration with centralized payment gateways is not being considered, but technically you can process payment out of band and then add the subscriber manually.
marius
@benpate are there any useful things built on top of them, or are they just crypto currency adjacent? Regular artists, I bet, would prefer to be paid in actual currency, not make belief money.
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
@mariusor I know there are a couple “monetization” vocabularies out there right now. I think the crew behind Mitra has published an FEP, and Mammoth/sub.club uses its own slightly different links to publish payment options.
When I get there, I’m probably going to implement one or both of those. But allowing guests to buy stuff online is close-but-not-quite the same as asking users to pay for their accounts.
marius
@benpate see if you can come up with some sort of activtiypub vocabulary based on this idea: https://floss.fund/funding-manifest/
I'm sure more of the fediverse creator would be interested in having some monetization capabilities.
silverpill
@mariusor @benpate I'm not putting obstacles in front of people, I'm removing them.
But if people want something else, they can use different software. For example, Ghost is going to support subscriptions. Someone can even fork Mitra and integrate Stripe, I wouldn't mind. All protocol extensions I have designed are currency agnostic.
marius
@silverpill which works for maybe 1% of people that create content professionally. How are we to dar say that the fediverse needs to accessible to everyone if we put crypto-currency obstacles in front of people.
In my humble opinion, any monetization option that only deals with cryptocurrency is useless in making the fediverse a valid alternative to whale content creators that might want to migrate from traditional social media.
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
Yes, I think this is the right model going forward.
I’m aiming at something like this in early 2025, though probably via PayPal and Stripe, not with Monero
silverpill
I am also planning to support per-post limited access. If your application has an option to pay for a single album, we can probably find a way to interoperate, because Mitra can treat Bandwagon albums as posts.
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
That’s great. I’d love to work out the details with you. On bandwagon.fm, this feature will also include digital album sales.
I think it will be as simple as making an access list for the people who have subscribed to each kind of content, then using “Authorized Fetch” to prevent unauthorized people from accessing protected content.
How far along are your plans for subscription feeds?
silverpill
@benpate @mariusor Subscription feeds as in "1 month of access to subscribers-only content"? This is already implemented. I just added you to the list of my paid subscribers and published a subscribers-only post (you should see it as a DM).
I didn't have plans to work on per-post access (paywall) in the near future, but that can be reviewed.
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