This was initially demoed at FediCon 2025, but CrowdBucks is an open source, self-hostable fundraising system that allows people to financially support one another. You use your existing Fediverse account to hold a fundraiser, and can also donate to other people's fundraisers as well. The form factor is kind of similar to Kickstarter or Patreon.

top 17 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 12 hours ago

Just support GNU Taler and Monero; not $tripe

[–] lime@feddit.nu 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

tl;dr: it uses stripe

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

Support for other providers is coming. Bandwagon is in a similar situation. The overall goal is to support a multitude of options, so that no one payment solution has a monopoly.

[–] birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What is Stripe?

[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 6 points 3 months ago

The company that's involved with the payment disputes between Steam, MasterCard, banks, 18+ games and Collective Shout. Stripe is the one handling payments between Steam and MasterCard. It got blamed, blamed others in return and suddenly is known to a lot more people but not in a good way.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

tbf not sure if anything the EU makes can compete with it

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 1 points 10 hours ago

Maybe someday GnuTaler, which is a direct bank payment system with full transparency. I think only one bank in Sweden (I think) is testing it ATM.

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Klarna is Swedish.

Nasty company though.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Klarna is like a payment layer on top of a payment processor, different things, even they recommend stripe:

https://docs.klarna.com/

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 2 points 3 months ago

Ah. My mistake then.

They are ubiquitous here, even when paying by card it goes through klarna.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

We really need to figure out the payment system for the fediverse.... Good to see someone trying things.

When I put Stripe integration into PieFed I had absolutely zero donations through there, meanwhile my Patreon and Librepay had dozens of dollars in donations. Dozens!

People really really didn't want to donate directly, for some reason. So I disabled the Stripe option.

Instead, Patreon takes 8% and their only payout method is Paypal so Paypal takes a percentage (5%?) and then when I transfer it to my bank from Paypal there's a currency conversion so they take another 5%? and then I pay tax on whatever remains...

I wish CrowdBucks better luck than I had.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

On our donation page, we put a breakdown of how much each platform takes from the donation and I think that is why a lot of users chose to donate through the methods that have lower / no fees: https://fedecan.ca/en/donate

I imagine as Crowdbucks develops, they will introduce more methods and improve user / platform choice. Dealing with payment platforms is annoying, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with over time

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 3 months ago

That's really nicely done, good work!

[–] Olap@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

So as much as I dislike crypto, it is basically built to be enshitification proof. And hence a good fit for the fediverse. But I wouldn't want to touch the crypto ecosystem with a ten foot pole, nevermind a lemmy/mastodon integration

Which leaves us at the behest of traditional payment processors, and they are all faceless conglomerates who care not for anyone. Meaning we're fucked there too

Maybe we should instead not bring transactions to the fediverse

[–] Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I've said it before, I think there's money in a service that crowd funds open source donations.

I use so much FOSS that making sure they all get some money is a real first world problem. If I can only give £10 that month what do I do? Rotate who gets the tenner? Give everyone £.20? Then you have to figure out how each service wants funding and organise that.

Instead I could go to FOSSfund select all the software I use and donate £x. That money gets divvyed up and stored with other people's donations until a threshold is reached.

When enough money is accrued the service makes a substantial donation. The FOSSfund itself is funded through interest gained while holding donations.

Of course I am a naive user that wants good things to exist and has no idea the difficulties in making them happen. Brb, off to vibecode a payment system. I forsee no problems. I will not be taking questions or feedback at this time.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 3 months ago

I think https://liberapay.com/ does that?

[–] squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 months ago

From their website

From people you know

CrowdBucks is created by individual people you know, and not a large face-less corporation

And yet, there are no people shown on the website. How do I do know if I know these people?