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Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

liberapay.com

11–20 of 88 posts

Re: Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

#11
post #9

Since Facebook fan subscriptions recently released. Another multinational corporation tries to claim 30% on the shoulders of developers/content creators/... I would rather see a "true" non-profit appear and claim this space. I also trust European non-profits more than American ones. The platform (Liberapay) lives on donations, supports different currencies, multiple languages, has multiple integrations ( Github, Gitl…

The question is not the money, the question is freedom of speech. A platform taking a commission is no big deal compared to the fact that it is allowed to determine what opinions are allowed and what aren't.

I'm not sure I understand. The commission is a really big deal for people financially dependants on recurring donations.

Re: Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

#12
I love liberapay but everytime I go there I see that developing floss is not a viable career path even for the best of the best. Weekly income is no more than 100€, that's what like an hourly rate of top end freelance developer (which really a lot of these guys are).

Projects like this are a very bittersweet victory for floss comunity. One step at a time I guess.

Re: Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

#13

Since Facebook fan subscriptions recently released. Another multinational corporation tries to claim 30% on the shoulders of developers/content creators/... I would rather see a "true" non-profit appear and claim this space. I also trust European non-profits more than American ones. The platform (Liberapay) lives on donations, supports different currencies, multiple languages, has multiple integrations ( Github, Gitl…

Well, Liberapay is for donations only, hence it is not a true alternative to Patreon and such. Also, you still have to pay the processing fees which, they say, should be below 5% on average.

Nonetheless, it is pretty well-made and needed, especially since they care about internationalization.

Re: Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

#14
This seems really great, I was thinking of doing something like this recently as well, although I was thinking more along lines of:

- I have a set amount of money I wish to give each month (say £200)

- Given I have setup x amount of people I wish to donate to, the system will automatically spread my money evenly amongst the creators, or using a given weighting provided

- I'll be able to add any new creators to this list and not have to recalculate the amount given to each one, given I'm still putting the same amount of money into my "donation pot"

Looking at their current system it seems to still follow the old paradigm of "set up a creator and set the amount for each of them individually", I hope that they could support something more like the above some day. Personally, the mental burden of having to continually reevaluate my monthly spend is probably the biggest burden when considering donating to someone new, which only gets larger as your donation list gets larger, so having the a system offload this I think would be a great way to encourage more donating.

Re: Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

#15

More important than the 0% commission is how open this platform will actually be, or will it also engage in politics and police certain speech as they see fit?

It is the law in France - as it is with most countries - that some forms of speech and expression are not tolerated and companies must not provide a platform for them.

Extremism on both the left and the right isn't tolerated. Nazism, Antisemitism, etc. all fall into the same bucket.

France - where Liberapay is based - notoriously has the "Burka Ban", preventing women from covering their faces in public. In the UK "incitement to violence" is illegal, as are certain forms of protest and speech, and it is infamously severe when it comes to libel/slander law. Germany has outlawed many forms of right-wing nationalism in fear of fuelling neo-Nazis.

Policing speech is inherently European. In some ways, it's why the United States exists, and one of the key differences in creed between European and American attitudes.

Typically European attitudes around this veer towards "tragedy of the commons" arguments relating to violence, incitement to violence and discrimination.

Attitudes are much, much more liberal in relation to showing and exhibiting nudity and it does not automatically equate that seeing breasts/genitals means content is sexual as it often does in the US.

TL;DR: they're going to police speech, probably differently to others, but it will be policed. Nudity/(consenting adult) sexual content is more likely to get a pass more so than US companies would allow, but discrimination and non-centrist politics less likely.

Re: Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

#16
post #4

Ha, so Facebook by claiming 30% of the profits basically advertised Patreon and Liberapay by not emphasizing the benefits. Instead of promoting 'ready-to-use' audience they've been caught in the middle between high percentage and fuzzy copyright rules. Good job

This is what greed gets you.

Re: Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

#17
post #14

This seems really great, I was thinking of doing something like this recently as well, although I was thinking more along lines of: - I have a set amount of money I wish to give each month (say £200) - Given I have setup x amount of people I wish to donate to, the system will automatically spread my money evenly amongst the creators, or using a given weighting provided - I'll be able to add any new creators to this l…

I hate to be the blockchain guy, but this sounds like something you could look at Ethereum or similar to provide. I'd consider using crypto if this use case existed.

Re: Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

#18
post #12

I love liberapay but everytime I go there I see that developing floss is not a viable career path even for the best of the best. Weekly income is no more than 100€, that's what like an hourly rate of top end freelance developer (which really a lot of these guys are). Projects like this are a very bittersweet victory for floss comunity. One step at a time I guess.

Liberapay is not the only platform that allows for free software to be funded. Here are two projects that are very well funded on Patreon. The platform itself is obviously not open source, but the projects themselves are:

https://www.patreon.com/godotengine

https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

Re: Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform

#19

More important than the 0% commission is how open this platform will actually be, or will it also engage in politics and police certain speech as they see fit?

Their platform their rules. Don't like it, then use hatreon or a direct payment method like cryptocurrency donations.
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