- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.
Not “Big Capitalism” commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.
Not OP, but I’d work real fucking hard to give us something that can be a viable alternative to Youtube where a corporate monopoly doesn’t take 95% of the cash. It doesn’t even need to be federated, but we all see the shithole Odysee immediately became. We have a substantial number of people here with like interests and marginally like feelings on a lot of topics that would make great video content.
Peertube has been around for 7 years, and there isn’t enough content on it to occupy even a Linux nerd for more than 30 minutes a week. People are only making videos on YouTube because they can make some semblance of a living at it.
I think giving people who are willing to create videos some decent tools for monetization in open products would be a reasonably good idea. We have nothing there now; we don’t have anything to lose by it. It’s not like great content that doesn’t exist can be walled off to us.
This could be as easy as forking peertube and putting in patreon privitization links. Or it could be a federated version of KoFi that ties in.
Honestly the best YouTube alternative at the moment is Nebula. The problem is that it’s a closed system. You can’t just make an account and start uploading, you have to be invited. So the range of content is fairly limited compared to YouTube. But unlike many other platforms, it is designed to be fairly general-purpose. There are some excellent individual creators’ platforms, like Dropout, Viva+, Club TWiT, etc. But you only get a single creator/team’s videos on those. Dropout is improv comedy. Viva+ is sketch comedy. Club TWiT is tech news. Whereas Nebula is more of a coop owned by tens of different creators with content including news, media analysis (including film, games, and music), politics, science, short films, game shows, and more. It’s not federated, but it’s independent and worker owned-ish.
I often forget about nebula. I really do like their model. Personally, I think their biggest problem is lacking a free trial. They’re curating, so I expect they’ll have some pretty solid content. But every time I consider them I go and browse their catalog and I don’t recognize most of it, and that what I do recognize is marginally interesting to me, but not worthy of payment.
I suspect their closed model is because it’s very expensive to host that data, and they want to make sure that whoever they put up there is worth spending the money on. Return on investment, yada, yada.
They have a 3 day free trial by default. And members can also give out a limited number of “guest passes” which act as a 1 week free trial.
That’s probably part of it. It’s also a marketing tactic. They’re positioning themselves as a premium service. They want customers to know that if something is on Nebula it’s going to be good. Similar to the way Apple positions themselves as premium by not selling a $200 smartphone, or Mercedez-Benz, or Louis-Vuitton.
It’s also about trust. One of the things they’re trying to do with Nebula is to provide creators a space to safely discuss controversial topics without censorship. But with that, along with the fact that they have a coop-type structure, comes the need to be able to trust that the people uploading on their platform aren’t gonna be Nazis.
Ok, I quibble with much of what you just wrote, but your first line contained a lucid point.
In essence, you propose that a federated monetization scheme would direct the bulk of the pie to the participants and not to the big corporate interests.
Now that’s a damned interesting thing to consider.
I think its obvious that it would/will go awry. Any time you get non-profits screwing around with money, somebody figures out how to steal it.
But if even a bit more went to the participants and paid for infrastructure, that would be a positive thing.
But again … non-profits and coops never handle money correctly. Watch this get all the way to the goalpost and then swoop, it all gets handled with GooglePay. Its doomed. DOOM.
I’m not even sure that is possible, but I’d like to see us try something.
Maybe the best place to start is by allowing a microtransaction service into the UI and let people add their own API keys to known players.