The overall idea behind sub.club is simple: people can pay a set amount of recurring donations, and gain access to posts from a private ActivityPub account for exclusive content. Creators using sub.club post private DM’s to their sub.club actor, and these messages get relayed into the private feed. Creators display their sub.club account handles in their profile fields, and apps such as Mammoth and Ice Cubes can read that value, and display a special subscription button.

Okay so it's Patreon for microblogging. Why not, if there is an audience.

Thinking about it, a federated OnlyFans could be an interesting concept.

At first I thought it was paid instances of established platforms, a la https://communick.com/services/lemmy/

I think paid instances are fine. Provided they actually provide more reliability, etc. although right now, many free instances are reliable enough. And a subscription cost to run your own single or friend group instance probably wouldn't be much either.

Although I could see a paid service which runs an instance for you, but you get to use your own domain name and such. Kind of like those Minecraft hosting services. Okay, I'm on another tangent.

Having to sign up to yet another platform to support someone’s work can introduce a lot of unnecessary friction

To solve this, here’s yet another platform

Fuck off.

Stop monetising everything, let us just enjoy our space without injecting business into it.

Politely: fuck no

Donations? Sure, but there already is stuff that does exactly that.

Subscription for microblogging? Absolutely no, especially not with a centralized, proprietary platform. Don’t start making mastodon twitter. Build your own platform or make your own instances if you have to, but don’t plug into instances without asking and if you ask pay them for the infrastructure they are providing for you service.

Go capitalize somewhere else.

I'm not totally sure of the wisdom involved in gating content when ActivityPub and the Fediverse are still so new and niche.

If you're putting out premium content that doesn't affect the existing communities, whatever, I don't care. But I do have to wonder how you're actually going to make money when most users are used to free content.

Wouldn't it be easier to use Ko-fi or similar?

Does this work work for anything other than mastodon?

If this worked for other forms of content than microblogging it'd be more interesting.

I don't have an issue with paying for people who make long-form video content, or people who post actual real long-form blog posts, or newsletters of interest but microblog shit?

There's barely enough of interest there to justify reading it most of the time, let alone paying for it.

Tweets and toots are just advertisement for the actual content, not the actual content, IMO.

This would be more interesting if it was a way to monetize Peertube or the various blogging platforms that are federated.