Add free nonprofit micro-donation processing?

Features and Ideas
1

Hello Diaspora community!

Do you consider adding thumb-up triggered micro-donations?
We develop a free nonprofit decentralized donation processor with a focus on privacy at Smartlike. (No tokens.)
Let’s cooperate! Details on Smartlike

Kind regards,
Vadim Frolov, Vienna

2

In Diaspora there is a simple system for adding PayPal donations. There are no plans to improve it or change it.
Feel free to fork the code and implement your Idea. Pull Requests are always appreciated.

3

Thank you for responding Thorsten!
Before I start coding, would the community please help me make a sanity check of the approach that comes first to my mind? (I’m a newbie to Diaspora and Fediverse.)

Why:

  • Mainstream donation processors don’t provide privacy, freedom (they usually censor payments) and micro-transactions (minimum amounts).

How:

  • To make Fediverse apps attractive for mainstream users, one needs to incentivize content creators to publish there. They usually care more about visibility (Facebook) or money (YouTube). Both are difficult to achieve without implementing a new kind of “circulatory system” for Fediverse.
  • Likes - one-click commission-free micro-donations starting from 0.01 USD, the money is shared between author and optionally website host/developer. Transactions are stored on a public ledger and accumulated to promote authors and the platform, like here, for example, - Smartlike (I’m still figuring out how to better embed Diaspora content. BTW, you can claim authorship of the embedded content and receive the money from external likes too.)
  • Recurring donations a la Patreon - users can support their favorite creators without commission, censorship or privacy disclosure.
  • I assume the most idiomatic way would be to integrate Smartlike via ActivityPub and post signed donation transactions to Smartlike nodes, make them automatically accept ActivityPub keys for Smartlike account management?
  • As a result, we get Fediverse wide content charts for better content visibility and discovery, provide streaming donations as an alternative to ad-sponsored content distribution.

Does it make sense to you?
Thank you!

4

Hi Vadim,
it seems that you have a detailed Idea for what for have in mind. Do you see that users would use this system?
Even if this idea matures and is discussed here, someone still has to be found to work out the technical details and finally implement it. I am almost certain that the core team cannot take on this task, but ask the community.

Share this idea inside or outside the diaspora network and see what happens.

5

Thank you for the feedback @tclaus

Do you see that users would use this system?

Yes. I’m here in the hope to hear how the community would answer this question.
Since I read you have doubts, would you please point me to a flaw in my reasoning:

  1. Donations are on the rise and most Diaspora competitors have recently implemented the feature.
  2. Diaspora is in the best position to benefit from the trend.
  3. Since the common centralized donation processors don’t fit because of the censorship and data collection whereas crypto based decentralized processors require KYC and not really user-friendly yet, I came up with an alternative solution.

My personal opinion: psychologically, we build on one of the basic needs of human beings - to forward emotions - to thank whenever feeling happy, enjoying the very process of giving back gratitude…

It was not my intention to load you with more work - integration is simple and won’t cost much time. Just wanted to make a sanity check first.

6

Hi @tclaus,
I prototyped a Fediverse to Smartlike relay.
It currently works for Mastodon and PeerTube. Could you please take a look and let me know if we should adapt it to Diaspora? Thank you.

It works via ActivityPub:

Micro-donations are accumulated per content item and shared between creators and hosting instances (example). To get paid out, users connect their Fediverse to Smartlike accounts by mentioning their Smartlike account in the Fediverse profile description (more details). Instance administrators add the signature as a DNS entry and choose what share they would like to receive.

When users connect their accounts, they can opt to have their Fediverse keys trusted on Smartlike in order to make one-click micro-donations when they click thumb-up/upvote/reblog/etc in Fediverse. An instance of this relay transparently forwards signed transactions from connected users to Smartlike where they are turned into micro-donations.

What we seek to achieve:

  • More people to join Fediverse. Popular content creators will get an additional incentive to publish in Fediverse, attracting their audience to join.
  • Fediverse sustainability and scalability. Instance administrators will have an option to take a cut to cover their hosting costs without asking for donations via a centralized service.
  • Improve user experience. Anonymous donation accumulators are stored on a public ledger and can be used by content apps to enhance feeds, charts, search and recommendations without robbing users of their freedom and privacy or building walls between platforms. Tags produced by decentralized crowdsourced moderation are also shared to let users choose what filters to set and what moderators to trust.