Every time a truly open protocol emerges, the vultures that shout "monetisation" will show up and demand that artificial scarcity must be created or else they will not come. But adding artificial scarcity to an open system makes it non-open. 1/7
So the real question is: can a truly open system be sustainable without monetisation? I am firmly on the side that says "I think that is is possible and I want ActivityPub to be at the core of that" while others claim that ActivityPub MUST be fundamentally changed towards monetisation to become sustainable. That is a dilemma, I recognise that. 2/7
For many years we iterated slowly and the fediverse based on ActivityPub blossomed. Many of us were (and are) idealistic, willing to spend our own money, time and resources to keep this whole thing working. 3/7
And now the "influencers" look at us and tell us effectively "nice thing you built there. Would be a shame if at all comes crumbling down because you don't want to change it so that it funnels your users money to me". 4/7
To which I would like to say "Well, you are free to work together and create a solution yourself that sits on top of ActivityPub for that. But demanding that we do that work for you is a bit rich, dontcha think?" 5/7
I mean, I get it, dear "influencers". You see an attractive target audience in the fediverse and you want to make money from that. But you seemingly fail to ask yourself why this attractive audience moved here. Maybe, just maybe it is because other platforms are considered to be broken due to the monetisation you demand to be introduced here too? 6/7
Anyway, I just needed to get this thread out of my head where it was spinning around for quite some days now. I might elaborate a bit by turning this thread into a blog post. Now I need coffee. 7/7
@jwildeboer#monetisation should not be part of a communication system. It can be part of the system around it, but for that #ActivityPub does not have to change.
@jwildeboer already supported by activitypub. You can set followers to require approval and posts to follower-only. that's all that is needed to implement something on top of activitypub. The rest is part of the server software on whom to approve, not part of the protocol.
@tokudan Yes. You could use webhooks to integrate with Patreon or other existing platforms to run a paid-subscriber-only model for example with a PeerTube channel. ActivityPub already has all the flexibility needed to do that. Someone could formalise that as a, say, fedipay (to give it a fancy name) standard and done.
@jwildeboer
I think there is room for monetization on fediverse, a small trading community, where one individual can sell things to another, small scale and p2p, no intermediary centralizing it, and the protocol has nothing to do with it.
@rochacbruno I would change that (using your argument) to "there is room for financial transactions on top of ActivityPub. There is no need to that on the AP protocol level itself" :)
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