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wouldn't https://github.com/sponsors/sudo-project achieve the same thing in this case?
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That's great, I wish he had mentioned it.
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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.
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$.01/user/month would be quite a bit here
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Subtract the standard ~3 cent transaction fee and he’d end up owing money instead. That seems to always be the catch with micropayment ideas.
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Sounds like the above 2 ideas should be combined. Lightning payments are more or less free, and an index or tracker that looks at your bash history could make it possible to spread 5$ per month over all projects that you use.
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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.
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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.
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I know crypto was supposed to solve this problem, but I’ve never seen an implementation that actually did the job. You’d think someone would have built a successful “Patreon for micropayments” in the past 10 years, but no one has.
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payment processors: "how about no"
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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.
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They are using github sponsors and have had some level of contributions.

https://github.com/sponsors/sudo-project

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