Communick Collective: a zero-commission crowdfunding platform to support content creators in the Fediverse

We are pleased to announce the launch of Communick Collective, a crowdfunding platform for creators and anyone that is looking for financial support from their audiences. It differs from traditional platforms like Patreon and Ko-Fi in two key aspects:

No commission

Membership in the Collective is available for all paying customers of Communick. It doesn’t matter if you are hosting your Matrix server or enjoying access to the whole suite of fediverse services on Communick’s flagship servers, as long as you have an active contract you are elligible to receive contributions from backers.

Given that we already make money in the hosting service, we can offer the crowdfunding platform without taking a cut. We will deduct only the payment processor fees and applicable taxes, and creators can keep all else.

Sponsors define a fixed contribution to the whole collective

In the traditional platforms, the creators define tiers of support and the backers have to pick the one that fits within their budget. Doing that for each new creator involves a new transaction and therefore a new set of choices and “budgeting” around. We believe that in the end this makes it harder for those that want to simply support as many people as possible and end up concentrating the donations around those who are more popular or those who end up offering more perks to the backers.

We want to create a simpler approach: backers define their “budget” upfront by selecting a fixed pledge to the Collective - which can start at $5 and go up to $100 per month - and after that they can get to choose how much will be allocated to each of their favorite creators.

We believe that while this approach will lead to smaller average contributions to each individual contributor, it will make things better by having more people willing to contribute.

Communick was created and developed as a proposed alternative to fix the current business model for the digital economy of the XXI Century. The already famous “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product” adage illustrates the main issue: while ad-funded business might have have given us “free” services which could be made available to anyone in the globe, it unfortunately also created an economic environment where consumers can not “vote with their wallets” to signal to the market what are the problems really worth solving. It also made investors and entrepreneurs measure the success of their work by metrics that have little to do with “quality” and made it all about “quantity”: instead of asking themselves How many sons and daughters are closer to their parents than they were before? How many journalists have time and resources to investigate stories to their communities? How many people are being inspired by the work of artisans and go on to create their own things?, they are living and dying by presentations that try to answer “how many users do we have? How many ads can we serve? How much time per day do they spend on our site?”. These are not metrics that indicate a healthy economy, and the fact that this has become a global phenomenon makes the whole endeavour even more catastrophic.

We strongly believe that the digital economy is healthier and fairer when everyone contributes a bit and that we are transparent on the business model. The crowdfunding platform is essentially a way to extend this principle to content creators as well. In this approach, they pay us for the service we provide, and they get paid by creating and developing the things that their audiences desire. Everyone’s incentives are aligned, and everyone is forced to be kept honest.

Funkwhale, the Fediverse's Favorite Music Service, now available to customers

We started with messaging and microblogging, now we are adding an option for people who love music to listen to their songs and support their artists directly and free from the Big Tech corporations. We have been trialing our own Funkwhale instance at Communick Stream and now we are ready to offer it as part of the suite of services provided by Communick.

With Funkwhale, you are able to upload your music library to a server (up to 250GB!) and listen to anywhere and also to browse collections provided by other community members. Artists can create their own channels and promote their own work throughout the whole fediverse.

With the addition of Funkwhale we are also changing the structure of our plans. Previously we were offering separate options for each of the individual services, but now we trying to streamline our offerings and we are providing all services for subscribers in a single plan.

Automatic Payment for Recurrent Billing (Subscriptions) in Managed Hosting Products

Today we are releasing a major upgrade in the way we manage subscriptions. With auto-pay (powered by Stripe) customers can avoid the hassle of periodic, manual top-ups and ensure uninterrupted access to our services.

Managing the subscriptions got a whole lot easier. After you signup to any of our managed hosting packages, you should find the option to set up Auto Pay (recurrent billing). Once you set it up, charges will be processed automatically on the scheduled dates, guaranteeing seamless access to the services you rely on.

For customers who do not want to use it or prefer to make payments with cryptocurrency, the prepaid system is still in place.

New Feature: Import your Twitter follows into your Mastodon account

Quitting twitter altogether may seem difficult at first. Despite its many flaws, the platform has managed to attract a huge number of interesting people who would otherwise not be so accessible. From sport atheletes and journalists to book authors and key political figures, it is undeniable that it would be good to follow these people, even if they are still stuck on the legacy social networks.

To help mitigate these problems, we are working on tools that can help people that want to have their primary social media presence on the Fediverse, but that still occasionally needs to interact with people on Twitter.

The very first tool we are building and launching for public testing is a Twitter Follow Importer. This tool is available for any Communick user with an active access plan to our Mastodon flagship instance. It helps to bring all the people you follow on Twitter to a Fediverse “mirror” instance, and adds those mirrored accounts to your own Mastodon account.

A more detailed explanation of how to use this is available on our documentation central

Huge thanks to the developers of bird.makeup. We highly encourage people to support the project and we are adding them to the list of open source projects who we are pledging to support.

Managed Hosting for Lemmy (decentralized Reddit alternative) in preview mode

Following up the introduction of managed fediverse instances, we now have Lemmy joining our selection of services.

Lemmy is best described as a “social link aggregation and discussion platform”. It is similar to sites like reddit, Lobsters or Hacker News, which lets people create their own communities where they can post links around the topics that they are interested in. Other members of the community can vote in posts and comments which helps in curation of the content.

Reddit is one of the top-10 most visited sites in the world and is especially popular in the United States, but now is facing a lot of protests due to its recent announcement that it will incur hefty fees for the usage of its API. Developers of popular reddit clients have announced that they won’t be able to bear those costs and therefore will have to shut down their operations.

What is happening with Reddit should be yet-another example of the potential dangers of our over-reliance on the “walled gardens” of traditional social media. By using an open source and decentralized system like Lemmy, everyone from users to application developers and content creators can feel more confident that no large corporation can abuse their power. Our managed hosting solution brings the best of both worlds: you are always in control and if you are not satisfied with our service, you can always take your data and host it with any other provider.