On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
The thing is that ads pay almost nothing. I’d be very happy to pay 4x what an ad would pay. But the problem is I can’t sent 0.12 to someone when I watch their video because 50% of that is gobbled up by transaction fees. So the only option is to bulk donate which either requires pooling money in a 3rd party or the user donating a bulk amount ($10). Users really dont like giving away $10 when it feels like they get nothing in return. Its all mental but its a very real problem. We will pay for $10 of dogshit food but not $10 for a software product we’ve used for 100s of hours.
Join the Communick Collective. Set up a fixed budget (let’s say $10/month) and then split that however you want between the people you want to help. This solves the micropayments issue and would show creators still addicted to Youtube revenue that valuable contributions will be rewarded.
You can actually do it using USDC (USD stablecoin) on Ethereum via Base for free:
https://www.coinbase.com/en-br/developer-platform/discover/launches/zero-fee-usdc
Most people think of crypto as a scam, but there are actual useful products being built on Ethereum, and this is a great illustration on where it is a useful tool
I think something like this is going to be a necessity to make a federates video platform work.
What are the transaction fees for USDC?