I know that most makers, bloggers, and creators use Patreon. I also knew after creating two test accounts on there several years ago that I couldn't bring myself to like it.
I did try to like it. Back then it was pretty much the only game in town, any other similar sites had quite low profiles. But on closer inspection, there weren't many things I could actually *do* with the big P to win over patrons. (Yep, no "e" patrons.)
There's also really not anything tangible I can offer in return for patronage. What I do the most of is blogging. About sustainability, recycling, the state of the planet, and my slow progress towards being able to develop machines and methods for recycling plastics, cardboard, textiles, food, and thin metals using inexpensive gear. Almost all my favourite activities are included in that - making small machines or adapting existing ones using metal and wood working and 3D printing, making useful products, and gardening and cooking.
That's a lot of topics, and so I have a lot of blogs to keep each topic (sort of...) separate. No point inflicting someone with sustainable / renewable / fossil fuel free articles when all they want is a recipe for green tomato chutney. But it's also a lot of work, entailing several articles a week, each of which can be hours or days to conceive, research, prepare, and do some artwork for. (Yeah I don't make good art, it's just a way to fill up white space on the blog while fitting in with the topic, but I find the processes relaxing.)
So there are a lot of costs involved in these things, and I'm not well off. So as I said above, I began to look for some way to cover some of those costs, and I'm glad I didn't use Patreon now. I do have my donations/patronage account on Ko-Fi though.
And there are quite a few dollar costs. Even my best way to keep people up to date on what I'm writing, my newsletter, is going to start costing. ("Starting February 1, 2024, Free Plans will no longer be supported on the MailerLite Classic platform.") And yes there's a way to stay free - but it involves moving everything to a different server. With no guarantee that the whole cycle won't repeat in a year, or six months, or six weeks...
I used a whole complicated structure of online apps to automate the posting of links to the articles on social media but once again if one link breaks, no link gets posted on any of half a dozen social sites so I do this manually too because I can't afford to upgrade to a scheduling site.
But you can help with that. Share the hell out of my posts, make a one-time or monthly donation, chat with me on Mastodon or comment here.
As Tom points out on his article, Patreon over-reached with their funding rounds and are now losing the race to stay fundable. Their efforts are going into how to make money off the creators and the supporters, and when that starts to happen it's a short race to the bottom from there. Yes it was a good platform in its heyday but by the time I took an interest the "enshittification" was already well advanced.
I'm a great believer in the saying that "information wants to be free" - and also in Open Source anything - so I really didn't think about the donation patronage model. But the sheer amount of time I'm putting into this and the costs I'm already trying to bear (and more that I really need to start paying to give me back some of my time for more useful work) forced me to try monetising, to any little degree.
I started with using affiliate links but while people read my articles about things I've made and built, they didn't seem to use the affiliate links. And since the links themselves were costing me a lot of time to gather and code (again, for a few lousy bucks I could have probably had an app that would automate the affiliate linking process) and so I stopped that experiment.
I tried making any kind of useful monetisation with Patreon but the hoops, the regulation, the already-apparent graspiness - I just closed the tab after my 20th or 50th or 100th time trying to make something you'd enjoy and I'd be able to live with - and that was the last time I used the account.
Anyway - please share the link to this article, maybe use the Ko-Fi or Paypal donation buttons. It would really help.
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