The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization

One thing that I've been thinking about for a while: the PeerTube platform is somewhat limited in providing tools for video-makers to receive financial support. At best, PeerTube offers a "Support" button on videos, but all this really does is provide a lightbox with links to various donation pages.

I actually think this is a bit of a problem when it comes to getting creators to use platforms such as PeerTube or Loops. A lot of people don't really see a point in joining a whole new ecosystem when they're well-established on YouTube or Tiktok to begin with, and a lack of financial incentives might make this seem like an exercise in futility.

The majority of this post is going to be focusing on financial support mechanisms specifically, but I want to be clear that this alone is not a silver bullet solution. It's just something that I think requires a lot of attention first. I'm going to talk about a few things the Fediverse ecosystem offers to mitigate this problem, with some thoughts on how we can better support video makers on federated platforms.

Payments, Access, and Friction

There are a few sticking points here that are worth thinking about. First and foremost is that, historically speaking, most Fediverse platforms don't offer good mechanisms for providing access to special paid content. From my limited understanding, there are two parts to think about:

• Payment Systems - payments in the Fediverse is still kind of a nascent, fledgling thing. A few systems offer the capability of buying or selling things through one or two major payment processing systems, and it's usually Stripe or PayPal. Part of the headache here is that this situation inherently props up a few monopolistic platforms, rather than allowing people to use whatever payment system is available in their own countries. Some of this can be worked around using cryptocurrencies – famously, the Mitra project leverages Monero for this very purpose, although I'm told it now can accept other forms of payment as well.
• Account Access - Historically speaking, the lion's share of Fediverse platforms lack a granular system for granting permissions to remote accounts. Most platforms in the Fediverse emulate Mastodon's privacy scopes, which don't do the best job of delegating which groups of people can see or interact with something. Either everybody can see a post, or just your mutuals can. Complicating things even further, there's not a great way to set something visible to a specific someone and let them know about it, unless you're specifically sending them a Private Message directly.

What's Available Today

There are a few cutting-edge attempts to solve this problem, and I think they might offer different pieces of the puzzle.

Premium Users

One PeerTube plugin I have a lot of admiration for is simply called Premium Users, and it does exactly what you'd expect. PeerTube channels that have this integration set up offer a special paid subscription button on their pages, and it does two things:

1. It takes a Stripe transaction to process payments.
2. It takes note of which Fediverse accounts made this transaction, and adds them to a special group that can see videos intended specifically for them.

On paper, this is great! We at least have a proof-of-concept to say that hey, this thing is in fact doable. Unfortunately, there are a few shortcomings:

• Limited Utility — people can only get this special access by clicking the button on PeerTube. If they tried to pay you out of band, through something like Patreon or Kofi, there isn't a way to easily set up their Fediverse account as Premium Subscribers. The payment system has no concept of what their Fediverse identity is, and the manual way for adding people is kind of messy and confusing.
• Rigid Scope — the plugin basically has to get set up by an admin, and use their Stripe account. Users then upgrade their own PeerTube accounts to add payment, and they get upgraded to a special user type. Anyone with that user type can see "Premium" videos from anybody on the instance, and the money only goes to the instance admin. This is less than ideal.
• Vendor Limitations — it only works with Stripe at the moment, which is not necessarily what other people are using to make simple donations. Trying to account for multiple vendors might be challenging, as it means that such an integration has to abstract away the specific vendors in another layer. This is not impossible, but can be somewhat cumbersome if you're trying to just offer a simple plugin that's easy to set up.

Unfortunately, this is kind of a deal-breaker if you wanted to create something similar to YouTube's "Channel Membership" feature for the Fediverse. It's less Patreon-like, and more like a way to see all the exclusive paywalled media in one place.

At the very least, we have a proof-of-concept on how to at least broker access to special content on PeerTube using payments. It's not perfect, but maybe it could be a foundation to build on?

Granular Permissions / Circles

Some of the most impressive development on this front comes from the Bonfire project, because their system actually lets people put their contacts into special collections.

While it can be a little bit tedious to set up manually, the main thing to understand is that this works really, really well. You can have as many collections as you'd like, they can all have special rules applied to them, and you can decide which collections can see which things you post.

From a technical perspective, I see Bonfire as a shining example for what all Fediverse platforms should follow: we need to think about access, permissions, and addressing for posts, all at the same time. You can create special custom presets today, and scope it to a specific group of people.

While I think the UX behind this is still complicated, I think the concept is solid, and a simplified version could be a very powerful way to create special scopes of friends or followers.

Paid Circles

The Emissary project has been thinking long and hard about this problem by offering Circles, which are the very user collections we've been talking about up to this point. For their Bandwagon application, the lead dev has been thinking a lot about music sales, as well as different ways to support artists. As a result, the UX is very much simplified, and more user-friendly.

Bandwagon does something neat by allowing musicians to turn membership of a specific Circle into a paid subscription. This allows artists to create special private things.posts, share events for secret shows, and even offer special tracks and albums to the people supporting them.

The lead dev, Ben Pate, has gone on the record in stating a desire to support many different payment providers in order to avoid monopolization of just one or two big vendors. He gave a really good presentation about the subject back in August for FediCon 2025, and it's worth watching.

CrowdBucks

CrowdBucks is still a relative newcomer to the space, and offers a few novel approaches that are worth thinking about. It's open source, and you can host it yourself, and the project acts as a wrapper around payment integrations to provide payment status, as well as subscriber information. That includes Fediverse handles!

What really sets CrowdBucks apart is this: you don't actually create an account, in the traditional sense. Instead, you log in with your existing Fediverse identity, which then allows you to financially support whoever you want, while also allowing you to do fundraising for yourself.

One other benefit I see to having services like CrowdBucks is the benefit of decoupling payment infrastructure away from Fediverse instances. Rather than trying to get a bunch of different platforms and instances to try to juggle Stripe and PayPal API keys for admins and users, it would probably be way easier to just handle the actual payment action on a separate layer outside of the social platforms themselves. Instead of every creator trying to sign into a bunch of different services, they could just authenticate against their CrowdBucks payment server instead.

Honorable Mention: Mitra

Although the project isn't as well-known as some of the other efforts on here, it's important to acknowledge Mitra and what it has pioneered. In a nutshell, this is a simple, stylish Fediverse platform that has paid subscription capabilities built in.

In a lot of ways, Mitra predates almost all of the other attempts to incorporate payments into the Fediverse. The lead dev behind it, Silverpill, is very active in the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals community, which aims to help extend ActivityPub capabilities in a somewhat standardized, grassroots way.

Mitra has experienced some friction in being adopted by the wider Fediverse due to an ideological divide: historically, the platform has only supported Monero for payment, and the wider Fediverse itself doesn't generally hold a positive view on cryptocurrencies to begin with. A recent release no longer strictly requires Monero, but some glue code would still need to be written to support payment processors.

Putting It All Together

So, we have all of these different pieces. Can we use them together to accomplish what we want?

Let's say that we use CrowdBucks as the middleware that wraps around potentially many different payment solutions. It offers an API, can capture information about who is paying you for something, and can potentially even denote what thing they're paying for specifically. Great! Upon initial payment, a special follow request could get forwarded to the creator's account, which automatically gets approved upon proof of payment.

A plugin or integration could directly hook up to CrowdBucks, and then automatically put that paid subscriber into a dedicated Circle as a permission scope that can see stuff intended just for them. Additionally, this special follow request could also enable special notifications that tells the subscriber when new stuff is available to them.

A lapse in payment or cancellation could also be handled automatically through CrowdBucks, resulting in the Subscriber being automatically removed from the Circle after a set period of time.

Limitations

This concept is not without a few different headaches. Let's talk about them.

Currency Support

While a fair amount of payment processors are set up to handle international currency exchanges, the experience could be messier for platforms that aren't set up to handle it.

This is particularly glaring in situations where one person might want to pay with cryptocurrency, and the recipient doesn't actually accept that.

What might make sense is for CrowdBucks to allow people to plug in a multitude of different payment providers, defaulting to a "path of equilibrium" where the payee and recipient both go through whatever payment system they both have in common. The alternative is to basically establish some kind of escrow/transfer service for money in various forms, and that can get pretty complicated.

Fediverse Identity

Identity in the Fediverse is still somewhat flaky and non-standard. The secret sauce that CrowdBucks uses for Fediverse Login is really just a series of platform-specific integrations, such as "Sign in With Mastodon", "Sign in With Pixelfed", and "Sign in With PeerTube".

This isn't a great experience for anyone that's not using those specific platforms. Theoretically, we should all be using the ActivityPub Client-To-Server API for platform-agnostic Identity Login, but the biggest players such as Mastodon have yet to really embrace C2S in any way, shape, or form.

If we could all rally around C2S for at least this singular use-case, we might be able to have a universal login system for the entire network.

Ecosystem Support

Finally, the biggest headache here is buy-in. It's very challenging to get a bunch of different groups of people to align to a common set of goals, implementations, and methodologies.

My thinking here is simple: if we can get some level of integration working for PeerTube, Pixelfed, Loops, and any other federated platform where such a thing might be handy, we might be able to make major strides in solving this problem.

I'm Still Optimistic

While I think we still have a long way to go before we get to a place where there's a clear-cut "standard experience" on how these things should happen, it's evident that there are a lot of pieces being developed that could be made to work together.

I hold the view that commerce, understood through the lens of "the marketplace or bazaar at the center of town", could be extremely beneficial for the Fediverse. If we are to build this thing, it's going to require a lot of careful consideration, with different builders comparing notes on how they're currently doing it.

Anyway, thanks for reading!