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Comment by rileymat2

19 hours ago

The problem is if I was going to do that with the open source projects I use, it is more like a penny a month * 1000 projects.

$.01/user/month would be quite a bit here

  • Subtract the standard ~3 cent transaction fee and he’d end up owing money instead. That seems to always be the catch with micropayment ideas.

    • Sounds like we need an open source index fund where you can make one payment that goes into a pool of money which is invested into the top 1000 open source projects.

      1 reply →

    • It almost seems like someone ought to be able to build some kind of digital currency with low transaction fees and no centralized payment processor that could power microtransactions. I wonder why nobody has done that yet.

      3 replies →

    • Sounds like the above 2 ideas should be combined. Lightning payments are more or less free, and an index or tracker that looks at your bash history could make it possible to spread 5$ per month over all projects that you use.

payment processors: "how about no"

  • Why? If every person participating is giving $10-$20 per month to tens or hundreds of projects and then once distributed, this equates to $x00 or $x000/project/month, why would the payment processors mind. Of course, it's all in theory.

    • they charge a minimum fee per transaction. from Accursed Farms' donation page (https://www.accursedfarms.com/donations/)

      "Paypal keeps $0.30 + 2.9% of every donation, so please keep anything less than $0.32 as they have enough money already."

      i think Cash App has the lowest fees i've seen at like $0.01 which would still be too much.

      not saying it is impossible - but likely not viable directly with the current payment providers.

This is why I feel like a missing piece of Patreon/Kofi/whatever is the ability to say "Here's $x; divide it automagically amongst the creators I'm currently following"

Sure, I think a lot of those donations would amount to a few pennies or so at once, but I feel like a lot more people would be willing to support creators if they didn't have to constantly choose which to support.

  • I would love it if something like Github would accept donations from a repo and parcel it out to the repo's dependencies somehow. It would sadly make Github even stickier, but it would be a great feature.