“Fedi Pledge”
(needs a better name tbh but anyway. also NOT a replacement for Patreon.)
Patreon is a service where you can… pledge to creators and get access to a
feed of posts in return? Basically you’re paying $5 or $10 or whatever per
month to get access to a social media feed.
Since it’s a social media feed… why not federate?
The “ideal” Federated Patreon alternative
In an ideal world, you could have pledges and creators in different instances
and still have it work. In the simplest case with 2 instances, you would be able
to have:
+---------+ +---------+
| Pledger | | Creator |
+---------+ +---------+
$ | ^ posts | ^
v | posts v | $
+----------+ $ +----------+
| Instance | --> | Instance |
+----------+ <-- +----------+
posts
But in the real world, this part where two instances exchange money is tricky…
In fact, for our purposes we can basically consider it straight-up impossible.
So we can’t transfer money between instances. What can we do?
Real World, case 1: Pledger Transfer
What if we could just… transfer the pledger?
Consider:
+------------------+ +---------+
| Pledger | | Creator |
+------------------+ +---------+
^ $ | posts | ^
| posts v v | $
+----------+ +---------------+
| Instance | | Instance |
+----------+ <-- +---------------+
posts
Assuming the pledger has accounts on both instances… what stops this from
working?
(In some contexts, this is what’s known as “multihoming”. It’s mostly a
convenience feature, as it allows grouping multiple instances under one feed.)
Real World, case 2: Gifted Pledges
This isn’t something we’ve seen with pledge services before, but Twitch has a
feature called “gift subs”. Is there any reason why we couldn’t have something
similar…?
We could also have it work across instances while at it:
+-----+ +---------+ +---------+
| Fan | | Pledger | | Creator |
+-----+ +---------+ +---------+
^ $ | posts | ^
| posts v v | $
+----------+ +---------------+
| Instance | | Instance |
+----------+ <-- +---------------+
posts
This is pretty much just a general case of the previous case. (Or maybe
multihoming is a special case of gifted pledges? We’d rather have real,
first-class support for multihoming than trying to build it on top of gifted
pledges tho.)
So, at least to us, these two cases seem like the hard requirements for an MVP.
They should be considered a starting point tho, not a final product. Also,
while at it, if we use ActivityPub for federation, we can integrate with
Mastodon, so a creator could make public posts that federate back to Mastodon.
Ultimately the goal is to be able to meet local needs, something Patreon, or
any other international service, will never fully be able to. If this were open
source (and it really needs to be open source, probably AGPLv3), then you could
setup an instance for your own country, and focus your service on your
country’s needs. But we can start with building a test network, without
involving real money or anything.