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FediForum April 2026

Fediverse Payments

Topics Funding models

Convener: Charles Iliya Krempeaux (@reiver@mastodon.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Notes

  • Some Twitch streamers now have talent agents and don’t interact with Twitch itself, take 30%

  • Charles: You need payments if you want the fediverse to exist

    • e.g. Forkiverse, podcaster brought in 1000 people

    • Most creators are barely scraping by

    • Payments in different forms, like commerce, Facebook Marketplace like

    • Need to be able to send money to a fediverse id

  • I have repeatedly looked to Ravelry re: an example of online advertising that the users LOVE. but I can’t get the dialogue going…

  • Send money to a fediverse handle

  • Jeremiah

    • Interledger Foundation: started out of Coil (Grant for the Web program partnership with Mozilla and Creative Commons)

    • Kickstart a payment network; “how do we use the settlement rail improvements as they become available to make global payments better?”

    • In the last 5 years:

      • Digital public financial infra (central banks now operating instant payment settlement systems)

      • US: FedNow, EU Instant Payments Regulation

      • Instant, runs all the time, but not well used in the US!

      • US currently relies heavily on card networks

    • We need tools/payment method that can leverage these methods as they become available, so they don’t have to change payment method

    • “Settlement method is decoupled from payment method”

    • Ozoned: timeline?

      • A: currently, beta-testing in EU

  • Thesis: money is meaningless unless it is moving amongst a community. Consider that, and how can we optimize that idea and for whom do we “optimize” that idea?

  • Jeremiah in chat: Interledger Foundation’s Web Monetization proposed standard for passive micropayments supports ActivityPub: https://webmonetization.org/developers/activity-streams/

  • Ozoned: we need products or services to sell

    • Jeremiah: Patreon alternative?

  • Johanna: low friction way of sending money to someone on the fediverse

  • Jeremiah: Ideal integrator for Interledger is a community owned bank

    • CHARLES: credit unions / co-ops Johanna: !!!!! yep

      • Wonder if we can engage established CUs in Ontario/Canada. that might be a real mutual benefit?

  • https://www.taler.net/en/

    • Taler is just software. You need an exchange operator, which is ideally a central bank clearinghouse.

  • Philip:

    • Separate our the payment layer

    • Everything right now is based on ad-revenue

    • Fediverse wants to go back to good/services

    • AP: assumption is that everything is public

    • There is no way to do at the protocol level of paywalling specific posts

    • Julian: A note that by design AP has non-public visibility built-in; ATProto by foundational design is public-only and all efforts to add a privacy layer are bolt-on screens.

  • Julian: Building on previous session (Growth of the Open Social Web: Follow-up from the Un-workshop), private social groups would solve this well as access via subscription could be be gated that way. It sounds like we are nearly there with Interledger and separate efforts to bring about federated groups, so we are perhaps 6-12 months away from rolling out a Patreon-like service that combines these efforts

  • William: Not subscriptions, but paying as you consume. I want to set a monthly amount and have that sent to the people I spent time with over the month.

    • Jeremiah: Web Monetization is meant to be the thing between ad-supported and paywalls. “Supported by viewers like you”

    • Jeremiah: See my talk about this exactly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwu8ELIa8B0

    • Alexis: Nebula does something similar where the creators on it all split the income based on watchtime or something

  • Johanna: “Not this hour’s topic, but part of a roll-out of something like we’re kicking around is going to be migration planning. We’re gonna need a Bounce, but for people’s or communities’ finance architecture.”

  • Ben Pate: Tying subsription to a group to have a private group is doable and already implemented in Emissary

  • (anonymous comment) “The Sexy Social Web”

  • “The Mastodon in the room” is challenging in slower adoption of FEPs

  • FEP means Fediverse Enhancement Proposal.

  • Keep the conversation going with hashtag #AssetFlow .