this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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So the fediverse has missed an opportunity here.
Get subscriptions into the system, but decentralised (ie, not bound to a single platform / corporation) and you've pretty much got substack on the fediverse automatically with authors having all the control substack gives them and more.
It's a real no-brainer except that the fediverse's aversion to money and any sort of "transactional" internet means such things are an afterthought here it seems, unfortunately.
It saddens me a little, because on top of that, there seems to be relatively little impetus to lean into bringing blogging back on the fediverse (compared to trying to merely clone twitter), when it seems like the perfect fit for the fediverse and its decentralisation (unlike cloning twitter, which won't really happen on the fediverse TBH). And just when a company could have been taught a lesson the fediverse seems to me to have dropped the ball.
There's literally a wordpress plugin.
I mean that looks a bit more like wordpress expanding their platform/ecosystem to get more engagement from mastodon (AFAIU, they've implemented user based federation only) ... which is all good.
But it's not the same thing as fulfuling the fediverse promise of a single ecosystem in which you have many options/possibilities to create the social graphs and interactions you want. In this case, something like a platform/plugin etc where any fediverse account (lemmy, mastodon, etc) allows you to subscribe/follow a blogger through a subscription, which is paid if desired, all without really having to leave the fediverse and be bound to the whims of any particular platform/company.
I don't know much about wordpress so maybe all of that is there already?
But, if there hasn't been some migration from substack to wordpress, then I have to presume it's because that ecosystem doesn't provide the same thing that substack does, and which I suspect the fediverse with its more social-media inclined platforms could provide if it had native and well-integrated blogging platforms or features with the ability to have limited subscription-driven access.
Its not a missed oppurtunity, it just hasent happened yet. Lemmy/Mastodon aren't a great fit for this, but it sounds like a new service might be.
Unfortunately the only payment implementation would likely be crypto, as otherwise every instance would have to setup a payment processor account, as most artists use things like substack to not deal with that. It would be hard to justify paying stripe/etc a large amount per month without taking a cut of the authors sales, especially if there are no authors on your instance making sales.
I appreciate optimism, and thinking about what can be done now is certainly the point of asking these questions.
But I think realistically the fedi may only have so many opportunities to prove itself to the world. On the whole question of how does someone handle business and money with the fediverse, it already seems to be behind.
I dont think we have a limited time frame to prove things. Mastodon is at 3mil users, Lemmy is holding on the tens of thousand's, we have the intial traction it takes to get a social network off the ground.
As long as these popular networks share activitypub, than the protocol itself is available for other like minded networks with different focuses, like a substack-a-like. It's the strength of an open protocol and a lack of profit motive that lets these fledgling services standup and survive while they mature into reliable competitors to for profit offerings.
I'm with you. But just to clarify, I'm not talking about time per se but rather these opportunities where a platform like Substack or Twitter drops the ball. I worry they'll be somewhat limited in the short-medium term.
Maybe I'm wrong and their occurrence is a symptom of some deeper shift that will persist until a new equilibrium is reached.
My fear though is that a fatigue will settle from this online discourse fracturing, and people will get tired of "moving" or keeping track of what new thing they're supposed to join and realise, with a serious kernel of truth, that part of the point of online spaces is to pick one and stay there and build a culture there and standup for that place's quality and resilience against whatever forces would seek to trash it.
If something like that settles in, I can see something like the fediverse getting a bad reputation as an ecosystem that misses the point of the whole thing with its shifting and fragile instances. Maybe I'm way wrong, but I've put this on my bingo card.
Maybe Ghost will consider adding activitypub support
That definitely sounds interesting (I've heard some are moving to Ghost, and from their page it definitely looks interesting).
The issue though is money. The fediverse doesn't do money, transactions and subscriptions, and so Ghost would have a hard time seeing value in federating as they wouldn't, AFAIU, be able to federate a subscription system over the protocol and so wouldn't be able to integrate with the userbase already here.
And this is one of the problems the fedi has. It's kinda on the roadmap for the development of the protocol, but probably a long way off. And even if it were in the protocol, it wouldn't work until other platforms added the features for a subscription system and successfully developed working federation of it, which in the case of, say, Mastodon and Lemmy, would only serve to benefit some other platform like Ghost rather than themselves.
So unless Ghost develop the necessary parts for the fediverse ... I'd be doubtful something like that is happening any time soon.
Otherwise, more abstractly, if I'm onto something with this take, I believe it's a good example of how the fediverse's dependence on monolithic platforms rather than a more modular ecosystem of composable apps that all operate directly on data shared over the protocol may actually start hurting the attractiveness of the ecosystem.
I don't understand the confusion.
Just use ActivityPub to publish blurbs and links to content available on your Ghost blog. Ghost supports subscriptions so you can then stand up a paywall when people click through.
Nothing about ActivityPub requires you syndicate full article content to the fedi. Hell my own blog doesn't do that, if only because Mastodon is not a good place for long-form content.
Fair!