The overall idea behind sub.club is simple: people can pay a set amount of recurring donations, and gain access to posts from a private ActivityPub account for exclusive content. Creators using sub.club post private DM’s to their sub.club actor, and these messages get relayed into the private feed. Creators display their sub.club account handles in their profile fields, and apps such as Mammoth and Ice Cubes can read that value, and display a special subscription button.

Okay so it's Patreon for microblogging. Why not, if there is an audience.

Thinking about it, a federated OnlyFans could be an interesting concept.

At first I thought it was paid instances of established platforms, a la https://communick.com/services/lemmy/

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Subscribes to Blaze's OnlyLemmy

[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think paid instances are fine. Provided they actually provide more reliability, etc. although right now, many free instances are reliable enough. And a subscription cost to run your own single or friend group instance probably wouldn't be much either.

Although I could see a paid service which runs an instance for you, but you get to use your own domain name and such. Kind of like those Minecraft hosting services. Okay, I'm on another tangent.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 1 month ago

If people are looking for such service, there is https://communick.com/services/lemmy, managed by @rglullis@communick.news

[–] __init__@programming.dev 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Having to sign up to yet another platform to support someone’s work can introduce a lot of unnecessary friction

To solve this, here’s yet another platform

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

The difference here is that you literally sign in with your existing Fediverse identity.

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 12 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Fuck off.

Stop monetising everything, let us just enjoy our space without injecting business into it.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 26 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Some of the people in the space are tired of panhandling, and would like to actually get paid for things they do. This can include: covering monthly instance costs, selling subscriptions to premium articles for a newspaper, supporting a video creator on PeerTube, or donating to an open source project. A subscription system is one way of doing that.

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

And some of the people are tired of capitalism being injected into everything.

Why can we not just have a space where people can be people without monetising it?

[–] Microw@lemm.ee 30 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I understand your sentiment, but you do realize that in the end someone has to pay to keep that space running, right?

[–] 3w0@lemmy.sdf.org 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I too wish for luxury gay space communism

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 8 points 1 month ago

Don't forget fully automated!

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 3 points 1 month ago

If you’re that cheap, you can register on this instance. I can assure you the owner has zero interest in making you pay for using it.

Small communities being run and paid for by self owned admins is nothing new and with how cheap it all is these days is even less of an issue.

If you really need donations, there are a million ko-fi like services.

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 month ago

Seconded. Commercialism and monetizing everything is what caused the www to rot. We don't need it here. Neoliberalism has already robbed generations of the right to simply exist or create without a profit motive, among other things, like literacy. Pretty sick of it.

[–] RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 month ago

Politely: fuck no

Donations? Sure, but there already is stuff that does exactly that.

Subscription for microblogging? Absolutely no, especially not with a centralized, proprietary platform. Don’t start making mastodon twitter. Build your own platform or make your own instances if you have to, but don’t plug into instances without asking and if you ask pay them for the infrastructure they are providing for you service.

[–] ohellidk@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago

Go capitalize somewhere else.

[–] rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm not totally sure of the wisdom involved in gating content when ActivityPub and the Fediverse are still so new and niche.

If you're putting out premium content that doesn't affect the existing communities, whatever, I don't care. But I do have to wonder how you're actually going to make money when most users are used to free content.

Wouldn't it be easier to use Ko-fi or similar?

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 2 points 1 month ago

A lot of people use Mastodon as an RSS feed where they can leave comments. This would basically allow you to subscribe to the content of a writer, and get it full-form straight in your feed.

I could also imagine following artists on Pixelfed, throwing money in their tip jar to keep posted on their newest creations.

I think there's a lot of potential here. But monetisation is always tricky on the internet, of course.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 6 points 1 month ago

If this worked for other forms of content than microblogging it'd be more interesting.

I don't have an issue with paying for people who make long-form video content, or people who post actual real long-form blog posts, or newsletters of interest but microblog shit?

There's barely enough of interest there to justify reading it most of the time, let alone paying for it.

Tweets and toots are just advertisement for the actual content, not the actual content, IMO.

This would be more interesting if it was a way to monetize Peertube or the various blogging platforms that are federated.

[–] astro_ray@piefed.social 6 points 1 month ago

Does this work work for anything other than mastodon?