[hn_throwaway_99]

The problem is there is so much content available on the web, but there isn't yet a federated subscription service to support it all. I would pay ~ $5 a month for news access, but I'm certainly not going to pay 2 or 5 or 10 dollars a month for each random site I visit to read their couple articles that may interest me. I just will skip their content.

[stan_rogers]

As Maciej Cegłowski pointed out some years ago, we already have a working micropayment system for content.[1] Unfortunately, the payments are going to carriers/service providers to pay for the page bloat that comes from not having another micropayment system.

[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

[52-6F-62]

Sounds like Apple News?

[bubblethink]

Thats not federated though. It's the opposite. That's a centralized middleman.

[reaperducer]

Yep. And if the price of two cups of coffee a month is too much of a burden on one's wallet, there's always Blendle for 40¢ an article.

[johncalvinyoung]

I go the other direction. I am way too fast a reader and read too widely to handle per-article microtransactions well. I do have a subscription to a couple of my top magazines and news sources, but end up reading up to the free allotment on many, many more every month. I'd happily pay $30-50/mo for unlimited access to many sources, but it'd have to have 10+ of my favorites on board to make it worthwhile. I read 20-50 serious articles a day, across free and paywalled and subscription content. I'm unwilling to pay $10-25/mo for each source individually. But if the average could get down around $5/mo for each major source (that I'll read 15-50 articles/mo from, given the access), and leftover change to the ones I read only occasionally, I'd be delighted. Basically, yeah, I want Spotify for journalism, even if it's a good bit more expensive.

[52-6F-62]

How have I not heard of Blendle? Thanks for the reference!