Catalog of Payment Solutions
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The payment processing landscape has changed dramatically in the 10 years since I worked there. If we're going to make marketplaces to pay creatives on the Fediverse, I think it's important to find consumer friendly solutions that work for as many people as possible.
I'll start:
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PayPal is the oldest and probably the best-known way for regular people to get paid online.
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Stripe is a slightly more "techie" focused tool, but they do such a good job with payments, subscriptions, etc, that they just have to be included.
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Shop/Shopify is one that I'm planning to research. They host full shopping carts for small businesses. I believe they have an API for selling from a third-party server. It would be interesting, for example, to see if we could like someone's existing storefront to the Fediverse.
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Interledger is an open solution that I'm still learning about. I can't say how "consumer friendly" this is, or how we'd integrate with it, but I'm going to be digging in to figure out more.
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Taler is an open solution from GNU that I've just learned about, and am still researching.
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In addition, there are lots of services (like ko-fi.com) that wrap PayPal and Stripe. These may still be relevant, but I'd really like to dig deep into the root providers with APIs that we can use directly.
Are there other way that you (or creatives you know) are taking payments online?
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good start of a list. could you mention liberapay.com just after ko-fi.com ? it is a good one for recurrent payments, based on paypal and stripe too. just mentionning it in the parenthesis with ko-fi would be enough. thanks. But I guess that if we develop a new mechanism for payments in the fediverse, then using directly stripe or paypal will be more efficient (even though I think liberapay doesn't charge any extra fee on top of paypal and stripe)
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There are also the new protocols https://www.x402.org/ and https://www.l402.org/