Hey everyone,
I was curious on whether anyone has ever thought about potentially introducing a Fediverse equivalent to platforms like:
- Ko-fi
- Patreon
- Gumroad
- LiberaPay
- Buy Me a Coffee
- Web Monetization (e.g., Coil)
etc.
What I’m imagining is a decentralized platform that allows users across the Fediverse to directly tip or support creators, all without relying on plugins or third-party integrations.
For instance, I know that creators on platforms like PeerTube can add plugins for cryptocurrency or payment solutions, but these require additional configuration or technical know-how.
What I’m suggesting is a straightforward tipping platform built directly into the Fediverse ecosystem, one that doesn’t depend on plugins—just a seamless way to support creators on ALL Fediverse platforms.
__
To clarify upfront:
- I am NOT a “crypto bro.” I’m not here to promote any cryptocurrency or blockchain agenda—I’m just thinking about user-friendly, decentralized solutions.
- While I AM open-minded about crypto-based approaches, I feel there’s potential for a non-crypto, user-first Fediverse tipping system.
__
What do you all think?
- Has this idea been explored?
- Are there any projects in the works that aim to address this?
- Do you think it’s feasible or even a good fit for the Fediverse ethos?
__
I’d love to attempt something like this myself, but sadly I personally lack the time, technical knowledge, and energy to make it happen.
Still, I’d be really curious to hear the community’s thoughts.
Thanks in advance for sharing your insights.
Yes I use lemmy.ml sometimes, but stay mostly on .world by inertia. It doesn’t make much difference. It does matter where the communities are. c/vegan is big and active and it’s on .world. The catfood incident there didn’t affect me directly (I’m not a subscriber) but it affected all the participants, many of whom are on other servers. So it’s not enough for users to move from .world. Communities would have to move or split as well. The federation model is that .world exports its censorship to every server that federates with it.
In fact, community fragmentation is already a huge fediverse fail even without censorship causing even more fragmentation.
[email protected]
Community fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. Your actual complaint isn’t about censorship, but about the small size of the Lemmy userbase. If the userbase was bigger, there would be more active server options, and the moderation of each individual server (such as lemmy.world) wouldn’t matter as much. Ironically, by ignorantly claiming that Lemmy has a problem with censorship, you’re actively working against attempts to grow the userbase.
Not to mention, if your biggest complaint of censorship is that lemmy.world bans discussion of vegan cat food, let me play the world’s smallest violin for you
Sorry, that makes no sense.
Lemmy as a platform has no censorship.
Lemmy.world is one specific server among hundreds that has a little bit of censorship.
It just happens to be the biggest as this moment in time, but that could easily change if they were actually censoring things to any significant extent. It never would have become the biggest in the first place if it were as censorship prone as you seem to believe.
Encounter censorship on Lemmy > move to a different server
Encounter censorship on reddit > nothing you can do
Defederation is censorship. It’s part of the platform.
Don’t get me wrong, I support defederating from shitty instances, but it’s still a censor deciding what members see.
I mean… I’m not so sure about that logic. Technically you aren’t wrong, but I think your point is misleading. In order for censorship to be problematic, it needs to be enforced by an entity with a significant amount of authority or control.
A communist newsletter technically engages in “censorship” against conservative viewpoints, but that’s hardly problematic, is it? Parents preventing young children from being exposed to objectionable content is technically “censorship”.
If you voluntarily choose to use a specific server when you have many other options at your fingertips, I just don’t see how the colloquial usage of censorship applies to that situation. Seems like more of a semantic quibble than an actual flaw of Lemmy as a platform.
Bottom line is that anyone can spin up a Lemmy server for free and post anything they want, and others can freely join or federate with that server and access that information without any barriers. That’s why I would argue the platform does not have any inherent censorship.
I didn’t say the censorship is problematic? In fact, I completely support it.
I’m just pointing out that defederation functions as censorship. Lemmy.world refused to federate with hexbear.net and that was when I moved to lemmy.ml - the power of the fediverse is that I was able to move to a different instance and I can interact with both communities. They engaged in censorship that I didn’t like, so I moved. It works!
Sure, but in the context of this discussion I’m responding to someone claiming that Lemmy has more censorship than Reddit. That perception is completely false and detrimental to the growth of Lemmy, which is why I’m trying to clarify the truth of the matter.
It certainly doesn’t have more. Hexbear came from r/chapotraphouse being banned, after all.
But hexbear has 4.4 million comments, whereas .world has 4 million comments. By not federating, they’ve effectively removed more comments from their member’s feeds than .world has ever had on its own servers. That’s pretty huge.