In Case the Wheels Come off the Patreon Bus...

[lb_lee]

Okay, so the latest thing where Patreon dropped payments and subscribers (thankfully doesn't seem to have affected me) has made us remember to discuss our plan in case Patreon goes down. No website is forever, all good rats have a way off the ship, and one of the nice things about the kind of work we do is, we know that a lot of you are fans of US, regardless of the platform we're on, and will follow us to wherever we are as long as it's not too inconvenient.

(This has also been percolating in the back of our head for years, because there are some parts of Patreon's interface that we deeply dislike. Finding old stuff again is hard! Once you name a tag, you're stuck with it forever. Etc.)

Should we need to leave Patreon, we'll be taking another small hop of faith. Instead of getting money through Patreon, we would be switching completely to LiberaPay, and we would be posting all the Patreon stuff (except doodle postcards) for free, either to healthymultiplicity.com or Dreamwidth. We would also make it RSSable and/or use a mailing list so folks could easily keep up with it.

We have been quietly using LiberaPay for years, and it's never given us a problem. Its whole "ART FOR THE COMMONS!" thing is very much in line with our own. For the past four years, it has been a boring, boring place, which is EXACTLY what you want your payment processor to be.

We've also been using hm.com and DW for years. DW's image hosting isn't great, but its accessibility and built-in RSS is, so are its tagging and finding-again functions, and we already have a paid account and are happy to continue paying them our cash. Their philosophy also jives with our own. We could also alt-text everything and make it easier to access for people with screen-readers, weird browsers, and so on.

So that's our plan. If you have input or thoughts, please let us hear them!

Comments

[hungryghosts]

I've heard that a bunch of NSFW creators are moving over to Subscribestar. There's also Ko-Fi, which is SFW - wonder if a combination of those would work in some way?

There's a few other options floating around (Sponsus for example) but I'm not sure how they are.

[packbat]

That makes a lot of sense to me! We've been thinking that we should have some kind of "if Patreon bites it, go here to support us" plan - we should take a look at LiberaPay.

[lb_lee]

Mori: Ko-fi is reputedly so hardcore against NSFW artists that we don't want to chance it. And also... we kinda WANT to make more of our work public again and go full-bore "FOR THE COMMONS!"

Patreon supporters (except for the 5 postcard people) would still get their rewards! Just so would everyone else. We kinda want to reward and encourage an attitude of generosity and sharing over that sorta gamified competition of, "oooooh, I want the thing that other people don't get! Thing is only special if not everyone gets to have it!"

Also self-hosting helps defend against enshittification, and we can't keep track of the access/reward tiers for 50 different paychecks. Since we can't do that manually, and don't want to get flushed out every few years by enshittification, the LiberaPay/public posts seem the best solution. (Though I'm open to persuasion!)

[lb_lee]

LiberaPay isn't a Patreon replacement. It's money by the week, intended for recurring subscriptions (we get $5 a week from it, have for years). You don't get to know who gives you that money unless you dig into the options (we have not), and you do not get to reward them... at least, last I checked they discouraged that.

It's very much a "make stuff for the commons, and may the commons support you back!" Kinda thing. Definitely not for everybody.

That said, we recall it as being pretty easy to set up, and it's required virtually no maintenance.

[the_broken_tower]

Reminds me a lot of Ysabet's crowdfunding. People prompt, Ysabet writes, posts what is available for funding with its price-determined-by-wordcount. Anyone can fund it and once the work is funded it's public.

Not quite the same as having reoccurring paycheques, though.

- White (he/him)

[packbat]

Makes sense! At the moment, we're in "everything is public" mode on our Patreon because we don't want people to have to pay sales tax on anything, though, so jumping to LiberaPay and posting elsewhere (probably itch.io) would be no change for us.

[lb_lee]

Mori: Itch.io has been pretty great. We're considering possibly uploading our fiction work to Squidgeworld, since it seems to be a super-accessible interface that allows for easy downloading in multiple ebook formats and with much less trouble than Smashwords.

[lb_lee]

Oh yeah, we totally used her model when we first started out writing for pay, ten years ago! We switched over to Patreon after a couple years because people had an easier time with it, and it was logistically easier for us to stay on top of. A lot has changed since we made that switch in 2015 though! And we like being able to make money off our art, writing, comics, AND multiwork, rather than having to split it all up into different streams/shops/venues.

[socialgaff]

I think this is a great plan. I'm a huge fan of the 'ART FOR THE COMMONS' idea. I didn't know you were on liberapay, and I'm glad to hear that it's working for people.

Other options you might want to take a look at:
https://comradery.co/
https://artisans.coop/

From my understanding, comradery is trying to do a co-op version of the patronage model, and artisans.coop is doing the same for an etsy-like storefront for actually hand made stuff (digital works are included). They're both pretty new, but worth keeping an eye on I think.