kind of interesting that the chokehold native-monetization ("subscribe and pay" button) platforms have over creators might be even worse than with non-money social networks in the sense that losing your "follower graph" literally means losing income, there’s not even a degree of separation - ThreadSky

danabra.mov • 47 days ago

kind of interesting that the chokehold native-monetization ("subscribe and pay" button) platforms have over creators might be even worse than with non-money social networks in the sense that losing your "follower graph" literally means losing income, there’s not even a degree of separation

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aleksandrhovhannisyan.com•47 days ago

Even worse, some of them don't even allow you to cash out if your balance is below a certain limit (e.g. $10 for buymeacoffee). Which I learned the hard way after my first $5 dono.

evbogue.com•47 days ago

Agree. Deplatforming scandals aside, my experience with getting like $100 (or whatever the number was) a month on Gittip led to me wasting way too much time focusing on the 10 people giving me 10 dollars a month and always sending me angry emails that I didn't implement their feature or whatever

evbogue.com•47 days ago

But now I have day jobs, so your mileage will vary. I feel like Bluesky does it right by pursuing VC since then you only need to make your board happy to get millions instead of the board choosing you for $10 a month

danabra.mov•47 days ago

does atproto solve this somehow. i dont know

hilarybaumann.com•47 days ago

Check out self-hosted Ghost for inspiration. I haven’t fully dug into turning on paid options with it yet but noticed it was there. I suspect because it’s going to act more like self-hosted ecommerce (w/ stripe & PayPal integrations) you have more flexibility.

danabra.mov•47 days ago

there's a lot of interesting social and open source stuff that could be done with money but this space is mostly taken by crypto and for a lot of people (probably me included) that’s just a no-go. if atproto could somehow interact with social payments (like patreon on atproto), could be exciting

moni.fans•47 days ago

patreon, kofi, onlyfans, tumblr more or less all have the same idea, so it could totally work on atproto. the ceveat is you need to have a culture built around supporting/tipping creators.
heck thats one reason i keep pushing for the ability to have a tip field on bsky profiles

moni.fans•47 days ago

especially for devs who run labelers - bc that stuff adds up- and users should not have to click multiple links to be able to tip/support someone

danabra.mov•47 days ago

and i don’t even mean being ideologically opposed to crypto (i get it doesn’t necessarily have to be implemented via boiling the ocean) but like, if i can’t connect this thing to an Apple Pay button or VISA card or stuff normal people use, it’s dead in the water. idc how it works behind the scenes

joeruelle.com•44 days ago

The other consideration is Apple policy. Payments to profiles generally don't appear to require in-app purchase (akin to peer to peer payments, credit card or other payment could be used), whereas payments to individual posts quite likely would require in-app purchase and the associated fees.

abr.bsky.social•47 days ago

It's slow going, but the approach that I think has the best chance of success here (moving real money between real bank accounts without getting into potentially questionable and/or highly volatile financial instruments in the middle) is Interledger: https://interledger.org/.

abr.bsky.social•47 days ago

I've spoken to a couple of the Interledger board members (Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz), and their notion of how all of this should work really makes a lot of sense and is imminently practical. They've got a *lot* of folks working on it, and I suspect it'll eventually get traction.

abr.bsky.social•47 days ago

It would be interesting to see what a small team could achieve by integrating ATProto and Interledger to allow micropayment-based access to creators' content. I'm not the person to do this – at least, not today – but I think all the basic building blocks are there.

iame.li•47 days ago

the conversation i had at atmosphereconf a lot was like

them: atproto needs micropayments! here's my idea [talks for a while]

me: that sounds like a cryptocurrency

them: oh no

iame.li•47 days ago

i do think user --> user stripe (or whatever) payments will and should probably be a thing but it's not very atproto-y, it's kinda just putting your venmo name in your bio at that point

sweetbee.vip•47 days ago

Stripe is sadly so strict, I’d love to see at few options if we did have micropayments, including somethingggg “adult”-safe but I know that’s much easier said than done

danabra.mov•47 days ago

what's the difference?

piss.beauty•47 days ago

bit of a rock and hard place

there is only 1 solution that actually can cut out the platform issue, but as you mentioned that has the social issue

even if patreon supported atproto based identity, at that point you're just on patreon with a different login method

danabra.mov•47 days ago

maybe it could start as a social payment graph on atproto and stripe, then add other methods, or something like that?

piss.beauty•47 days ago

if the operator of the payment graph is different from the operator of apps that use the graph it could work with credible exit

if the patreon-like also controls whatever links atproto identity to a payment account then exit is harder

piss.beauty•47 days ago

if there was a patreon-like on atproto that handled payments via stripe or whatever, I think you'd still lose most subscriptions even if you can port the social graph, because it would require setting up payments again

actually this just gave me an idea though

laurenshof.online•47 days ago

theres also the problem that the people who are most interested currently in a patreon alternative are people who want to avoid stripe/patreon censorship. so if you build something on stripe it loses relevancy for a crowd thats most likely to be an early adopter

piss.beauty•47 days ago

maybe just have to beat Patreon's current %8-12 rate

raantuva.fyi•47 days ago

Maybe with the right build but yeah it's confusing and I have no response when anyone brings that up cause they're right.

Some of it might be down more to them not knowing how to diversify enough to not worry about losing a couple of platforms...

abr.bsky.social•47 days ago

Its model of federation and portable identifiers might play a role in the future, but someone needs to put together a monetized service on it. You may also find the work that https://dtinit.org/ is doing interesting.

jem.fm•47 days ago

waitttt has no one made an atproto subscription service yet??? cc @sweetbee.vip 🤔🤔🤔

sweetbee.vip•47 days ago

👀 hmmmm

you could hack something together with https://graze.social where you can set any feed so that only a specified list of users can see it

it wouldn’t quite feel as native as what other platforms do though because you’d have to find some way to set up & track payments on your own on the side (atm)

jem.fm•47 days ago

ok plot twist i realized there’s prob reasons why content sites wouldn’t want to share follower graphs with 🦋

dvidsilva.bsky.social•47 days ago

I’m making this open source marketplace and on the roadmap to add extensions to support different payment gateways, or self hosting for larger volume creators

Currently at like 4 users, but like someday 👩‍💻

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