Hey Jer, thanks for your feedback and the food for thought. I apologize for the really long response.

I think it’s good that you see people buying and selling stuff through the Fediverse every day. My pushback pertains more to the fact that a large part of this is done out-of-band. Depending on the nature of the beast, this ranges from a minor inconvenience (sending a PayPal payment to someone) to much more messy and complicated situations (crowdfunding with donor rewards, or selling music through a federated system).

I’m not sure you’ve really made the case for why you think these things need to happen on-platform, putting stuff like “dealing with taxes,” “dealing with fraud” and “dealing with copyright violation” etc on the plates of platform administrators who already have too much to do.

What gives the impression that platform admins would be the ones handling this, rather than the various layers of the payment system? If CrowdBucks or something like it were capable of hooking into Stripe / PayPal / etc, and the Fediverse content platform were to piggyback off of that, wouldn’t all of the financial obligation stuff either fall to the CrowdBucks side plus the payment processors?

I mean this in earnest: if I’m running Shopify and Stripe to operate a Web Store that’s integrated in some way with my WordPress site, wouldn’t most of the transactional management go to Shopify’s side of the house, with Stripe for the really robust records management?

It doesn’t really seem like you’ve thought through what adding revenue and commerce to these platforms really entails.

I’ll admit that I’m probably only capable of understanding limited aspects of the situation at this present time. I don’t claim to be an expert, if anything I’m open to the possibility of being wildly wrong. Admittedly, the scope of use-cases I’ve illustrated is kind of small compared to many different use-cases seen in online commerce.

To me it sounds like you’re really making two arguments simultaneously: the first is that we need to financially incentivise people to join the fediverse and perform here, and the second is that people need to be able to support each other by buying and selling and commissioning.

I believe that both things being argued are true, and that they are unified by a perceived need for commerce, a workable payments system, granular permissions scopes, and mechanisms for conditionally putting contacts into collections. These things would enable Patreon-like sponsorships, fundraising, selling access to exclusive media, maybe even adding actual transactions to things like Flogmarkt instead of the existing “trust me bro” out-of-band payment experience it relies on.

Is it really that important to entice people who don’t want to publish here to do so?

I think your argument here is putting the cart before the horse. I’m not saying that we should bend over backwards to woo a bunch of people who seemingly give zero fucks about us or this space.

What I am saying is that this place is a desolate wasteland when it comes to trying to make a living building for this place, whether it’s content production, instance management, doing work for other people, or feeding yourself by selling things you’ve made.

We lack the infrastructure and means to support the majority of this, but then we naively build clones of every existing social media platform out there and somehow expect people to use it because it’s somehow better. But people can somehow make a living for themselves within the confines of Big Social.

I’m not saying that we have to woo professional content creators to actually put half-decent content on this network, so much as the fact that this network offers next to nothing for anyone who hopes to make a living building for this place.

As someone who has spent a decade and a half here, I think it’s a dire situation. I’m tired of feeling like we’re a bunch of holier-than-thou anarchists running a grocery coop, who would desperately smash out their own windows to avoid the sin of turning a profit. I’m tired of being in a situation where all of us have to beg from each other by passing the same few pennies around the proverbial collection plate. This entire place is predicted on uncompensated labor pushed to the extreme, and it doesn’t have to be.

Anyway, my thoughts are that some level of commerce and a market and a way to facilitate all that would actually help address a big part of what I’m complaining about.