20h ago

Castopod introduces Web Monetization (an ActivityPub tip jar)

podlibre.video Demo of Castopod and Mastodon with Web Monetization support (FOSDEM 2025)

Demo of Castopod ActivityPub support and demo of Mastodon tip jar using Web Monetization, As the social networking landscape evolves, marked by moments of mass migration between platforms—often triggered by political or cultural shifts—open-source ecosystems have a unique opportunity to make a diffe...

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And the enshittification process begins anew.
- A lot of communities on fediverse depends on menetization of their content, like comic artist, illustrator, cosplayer, and so on.
  It doesn't really show on Western fediverse, but on Japanese fediverse its really visible.
- My brother in Christ, it's a community built service that runs on donations.
  Building infrastructure to process those donations is not "enshitification" 😅
- Asking for voluntary tips isn't enshittification. It's surviving within the reality of shitty capitalism. I donate to my instance admins, for example, because as much as they probably would love to just run this instance for free, they can't.
  This is probably the most ethical way to ensure creators can continue to eat, especially with generative software models able to produce competing garbage in gigantic volumes.
- Brother payment transfers have been enshittified for decades.
  
  I meant specifically for ActivityPub & the Fediverse. Now there's money in it.
  
  There has always been money, it's just other people footing the bill for you.
  
  There should be some money in it. We want instance Admins to have at least the server hosting covered.
  
  How much have you donated to your instance admin since signing up?
  
  Its basically a meta tag that points at a tip jar that's embedded in web pages... This is the same implementation as RSS and only matters to you if you are looking for it or have the ability to act on it.
  That means its entirely opt-in and entirely detached from any one company
  
  On the one hand, people should be able to make a living.
  On the other, places where every Tom, Dick and Harry has their hand out expecting payment for the most inane things (i.e. tipping culture, states where billboards are allowed...) turn pretty crap pretty fast.
  Something to remember is that advertising on the internet was a slow-roll at first... until all of a sudden, everyone has ads and popups.
  
  A valid concern. However, nothing is stopping people from doing the same right now with a big old forced Kofi/patreon/whatever banner, and I'm not sure that this changes that.
  The advantage of this over current options is that like RSS, you can consume/deliver it however best suits you without needing to have different accounts of different platforms.
  
  I hadn't thought about the Kofi banner thing, and this is anecdotal though my experience, but upon seeing that mentioned my mind immediately jumped to the Steam Workshop; at least with some of the games I play, it's very common to see some form of "Donate".
  Setting that aside, the thought occurred to me of somehow tying something we're all used to seeing and interacting with - usernames - into something that if one were so inclined, could interact with somehow to pull up something like a QR code to their "donate box" of choice.
  I have no idea how it'd be actually implemented, but it doesn't seem impossible that something like that could allow for both traditional fiat payments, crypto, or even links to "Yoder's Rent-a-goat". I mean, I'd work for a goat as payment, so why not.
  QR codes themselves are pretty visually meaningless, and that physical step of the user having to scan it would be that "fully intentional" aspect that'd keep things from being somewhat predatory (thinking in-app payment type stuff).
  <shrug>
  I have no skin in this game, so just thinking out loud on this, is all.
  
  Thats absolutely possible via the underlying WebPayments API. The payment "wallet" is linked in the HTML (at least for web pages, RSS, podcast RSS, etc) so someone could design an app that reads these links as QR codes.
  The whole point of WebPayments is that and payment solution that you (the "spender") wants to use which is compatible can be used to send money to any compatible wallet.
  Whether the payment solution is via government backed, banking systems, or crypto, all it needs to be is compatible.

22 comments