Combining groups and payments into a fedi-forward service for content creators

[julian@activitypub.space]

Unfortunately I was only able to join for the third and last day of FediForum, but the energy was quite strong even then!

There were some interesting discussions with @ozoned@btfree.social @reiver@mastodon.social and others (@johannab@cosocial.ca, @j12t@j12t.social, etc) about fediverse payments and growing the open social web — this spanned two session slots, actually!

One thing that came out strongly was the need for content creators to get paid. This directly echoes @paige@masto.canadiancivil.com’s talk from @fedimtl earlier this year. The other half was reflecting on the lack of appropriate value-adds for donators, such as private groups.

We have all of these things, but separately. Perhaps combining them into an easy-to-use service is the secret sauce that will open up the fediverse to content creators.

There is work with the Interledger Foundation (@jeremiah@alpaca.gold) to make the financial side happen. There’s ongoing work with CrowdBucks (@reiver@mastodon.social) to connect fediverse accounts with payment gateways. On the threadiverse side, each of us (NodeBB, Lemmy, Piefed) have support for private groups, but not federated private groups.

This might be an opportunity for the threadiverse implementors to work together (especially with @mayel@bonfire.cafe and the rest of the SWICG Groups Task Force (@groups)) to bring federate private groups out of the realm of theoretical possibility and into reality.