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by kgraves 2418 days ago
Great work! This is a good YouTube alternative I can get behind, however after reading a little bit I kind of frowned at this line on the plugin paragraph.

> You could also imagine plug-ins to sort videos in reverse alphabetical order, or to add a Tipee, Paypal or Patreon button below videos!

Please don't consider or be tempted by those three proprietary platforms, I would much rather prefer donating using Liberapay instead.

Other than this, PeerTube has got huge potential and I would love to know what content creators (on YT or HN) think of it.

6 comments

Just because you prefer it doesn't mean others do or that you should only offer a single option because it's "better".

If I'm a creator and I've already got a Patreon userbase then forcing me to switch to another similar service just to use PeerTube is an unnecessary hurdle so I'll carry on the path of least resistance which is not using PeerTube.

I love Liberapay, but it suffers from its policy that donations need to be unambiguously donations. You can't have reward tiers or exclusive content.

That's a decision I respect, and I'm not saying it's a bad thing we have a pure donation platform. But I don't think Liberapay is a replacement for Patreon, because the economics and incentives for donations online are messy, and Liberapay doesn't help me navigate that mess.

I would love to have an Open donation platform that was more willing to get into that grey area between donations and purchases. Patreon isn't really that great of a platform, a replacement would be welcome.

The point for the plugin system is that someone could write those things. That also means you could easily write a Liberapay plugin.
Unfortunately, there is no alternative. Everybody uses PayPal or Stripe on the backend...
> Everybody uses PayPal or Stripe

Are you implying that there are literally no other payment platforms than ones that reduce to PayPal or Stripe?

Unfortunately yes. Look at Librepay's "How it works for creators" paragraph:

"We currently support processing payments through Stripe and PayPal."

I think you can add any plugin you want, which can include all kinds of payment buttons.
Perhaps reach out and let them know about it