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FediForum June 2025:

Payments on the Fediverse: Shut up and Take My Money!

/2025-06/session/4-e/

Topics:

Convener: Ben Pate (@benpate@mastodon.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Notes

Attendee: Need business case to be sustainable for hosting an instance. Set up payment page with https://beabee.io/ (OpenSource: https://github.com/beabee-communityrm)

  • Curious about other payment solutions. Saw Castopod and Web Monetization, GNU Taler

Attendee: Fediverse doesn’t have a payments layer. There’s no open source client layer. There’s no open source Stripe. Monetary side of tech is not open. There’s cryptocurrencies, but strongly disliked in fediverse. Bandwagon allows hooking up PayPal or Stripe. Not open, but works. Mapping the donations from opencollective to fediverse not possible.

Sub.club exited, but ran out of budget, low traction.

https://x402.org/ and https://www.l402.org/

Charles: Integrating with banks is really difficult

Charles: negotiating a “good” deal to integrate with a bank is often difficult.

Jeremiah: Interledger foundation is working on Open Payments standard as a way to not need an open source Stripe, by removing the need for an intermediary payment aggregator between bank payments (person to person payments). https://interledger.org/

Taler is a “local payment method” but not a “cross border payment method”. Possibly regional like within EU, but not demonstrated in practice yet. https://www.taler.net/en/index.html

Ryan: not a technical problem! tons of existing, good ways to do payments online. Open source, closed source, centralized, decentralized, crypto, APIs, banks, etc. The problem is that the fediverse is largely anti-money in most/all forms right now. We need to start with the culture, community and UX challenge, not worry about how to build yet another mediocre online piece of payment tech.

Mastodon in very early stages at looking at paying money to support a server (?)

We don’t necesarily need a protocol level thing. Each server can do whatever it needs. What we cant do is easily pay across servers.

Charles: couldn’t we send

Charles: solving some UX problems might involved resolving a Fediverse ID (ex: @reiver@mastodon.social to a payment method. Maybe “resolving” that involves looking up the Actor “activity” document, and looking for appropriate information.

Jeremiah: Open Payments / Web Monetization in JSON-LD for extending Activity Streams: https://webmonetization.org/developers/activity-streams/ . Open Payments spec defines a way for you include any payment method you might use. https://webmonetization.org/ https://openpayments.dev/

Michael Foster: Proposal for a working group for payments.

Sustainable server revenue and moderator funding a concern

Demo of https://bonn.digital/

Patreon takes big cut. LibrePay also gives control of customer relationship to a third party.

https://beabee.io/en/home/ as an alternative for subscription management

Chat: OnlyFans for fediverse (fedifans!), not necessarily as content but as example of great pay-to-access and pay-to-subscribe mechanism experience. For adult content, challenge is payment processors don’t want to work with the industry in general.

Mitra as possible solution, but only supports Monero. No local currency support.

Freemium as a model. Example of Proton: it’s free, but you can pay to upgrade. PeerTube idea: free, but pay for faster transcoding. Signal, also operating on Freemium and it’s only premium is a badge.

Also a challenge of developers contributing to fediverse software. Many of them don’t have access to the project’s funds, which are centralized to the project maintainers. Standards work also underfunded.

NLnet no longer has EU funding for Next Generation Internet. EU pivoted to “AI” (to many facepalms)

Info regarding VAT: no sale, importation, consideration, (1 other). Not VAT exempt. It does not apply. https://datenbank.nwb.de/Dokument/993339/

KoFi doesnt do invoices . Recommendation to just use Stripe directly instead. Example: https://support.thisismissem.social

One Mastodon community server doing €1/month, nominal payment just to remove concept of “free as in beer” for services. People in DE can afford it. Whatsapp grew to hundreds of millions of users paying $1/year before Meta acquisition.

We’re conflating a few different things here: 1) paying people to develop fediverse software, 2) paying people to run fediverse instances etc, and 3) payments between fediverse users for anything else. They’re pretty different use cases!

“Cryptocurrency was invented to sidestep regulation.” Your options are using it, using Stripe et al (centralized payment aggregator), or Interledger Open Payments (early stage, getting banks onboard takes time)

Challenge of Apple not adopting payment standards in browsers, Apple and Google blocking third-party payment options in app stores,

Johannes: Need to normalize paying for things in the fediverse. [hell yes!] First thing is paying for the server you use. Second is paying for developers of the software. [Third is paying each other for everything else.] Need a cultural expectation to contribute to community servers.

Recognize non-monetary work too. Eg. regular monthly updates.

Jeremiah: Simultatenously funding the community server, the content creators, and the software developers simultaneosusly is something Web Monetization can do. See my FOSDEM demo. https://podlibre.video/videos/watch/8b5b96b6-d57a-4b5f-9a26-46e70423c92a

Michael Foster proposed we start a working group about making money in the Fediverse, more along cultural and functional concepts vs protocols. Ben Pate will convene by messaging folks listed above ^

Federated peer marketplace https://community.interledger.org/hopsauna/hop-sauna-a-social-marketplace-framework-introduction-and-roadmap-2p9b

GLS bank in DE endorsed as good bank

Subscription based access to content needs several missing features (only share to paying followers)