Apr 17, 2024
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.
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.
Feb 12, 2024
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.
Aug 29, 2023
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.
Aug 4, 2023
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.
Jun 9, 2023
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.