I know that channel creators on PeerTube can add links to Buy Me a Coffee, Ko‑fi, Patreon, etc., but there’s no native, in‑house way for a casual viewer to directly support a creator from within PeerTube itself.
Do you think PeerTube should implement a built‑in “Join” button that would handle payments/subscriptions internally, without sending the user to a third‑party site?
Potential Pros:
Easier for casual viewers to support creators without leaving the platform.
Could help smaller creators earn more from one‑time donations or memberships.
Might make PeerTube feel more polished and competitive with YouTube.
Potential Cons:
Could add complexity to moderation and hosting for instance admins.
Might raise legal or tax issues for different countries.
Could centralize financial control, which goes against PeerTube’s decentralized ethos.
What do you think — worth adding, or better to leave this to third‑party services?
This could also be an optional feature that instance admins can enable or disable, so it still fits within the federation model.
That would add a whole lot of responsibility to Framasoft’s plate that they probably don’t want…
At engine level, I think it’d be interesting. At creator and instance levels, I think it should be opt-in, and not either opt-out or mandatory.
From a technical point of view I really don’t think it belongs in PeerTube core. Some reasons:
- Each country has a different solution for it (YouTube has a legal entity in each country to deal with it, that’s impossible for PeerTube instance admins)
- PeerTube is just software which anyone can use, it has only two developers, payment is not really a technical problem but mostly a legal one
- Any commercial solution which PeerTube would choose would need to be forced on everyone
- Most of the people on PeerTube don’t do it for money anyway
Just from the top of my head.
Could just add a Monero button that would open your Monero wallet and let you send a donation.
I don’t have monero, and I never heard of it, and I doubt I want to deal with crypto both as a viewer or a creator.
As long as the button is added by the creator I’d be OK with it, but that is not what OP wants to solve.
The OP wanted a way to donate to creators, and Monero is a good way to donate to creators.
The creator would obviously have to add their Monero address in order for the button to show up anyway.
From what I understood the OP was the point that the creators of PeerTube would create a way of payment and then distribute the money to the instances and to the creators, similar to what YouTube is doing. They said that they’re aware of the possibility to add “Buy Me a Coffee, Ko‑fi, Patreon, etc.,” buttons but wanted a native way of doing it in PeerTube.
From op
I know that channel creators on PeerTube can add links to Buy Me a Coffee, Ko‑fi, Patreon, etc., but there’s no native, in‑house way for a casual viewer to directly support a creator from within PeerTube itself.
I read this as support the creators, not the instance.
Yes. Anyway it’s not so easy to do that for farmasoft because of all the legal issues.
With Monero, there is no legal issues because it’s directly from the viewer to the creator with no middleman in between. The instance isn’t facilitating the payment, framasoft isn’t facilitating the payment.
Yeah I think that makes more sense than what OP is looking for. The problem is only that almost nobody has an account there and set up payment like a lot of people already do with a google account for YouTube Join.
But still It’s more reasonable than Farmasoft developing something just for PeerTube.
