Distribute tips among authors that showcase support information

[rigelk]

This issue is a writeup following a thread on the fediverse, now published as a blog post. I will paraphrase some text from it, and strongly recommend you to read it before what follows.

The rough idea is:

1. We have a network of content servers (Peertube, Funkwhale, MediaGoblin instances...). Those servers are hosting and replicating the content (music, videos, whatever), making it available on the internet, for free (this is important and incidentally what we are already doing)
2. Creators publish their content on those servers
3. Creators define needs/goals in a standardized way. Those are also made available publicly.

Now, that is where this issue finds its purpose: find a way to interact with an upcoming standard (3. Could be based on ActivityPub, but let’s focus on the bigger picture here). We already have a support button/info zone that can hold more than just links. It's far from ideal, as the info should be updated by the author from their main account and broadcast to update the info on all videos and tipping accounts, but that's another story that will need integration in ActivityPub.

We could use the support button info to identify Liberapay accounts for instance, and automatically trigger a mail at the end of the month, giving hints as how to balance the tips depending on how much the user has viewed each video featuring support info. Beyond that we could also trigger the tip on Liberapay, but that would need some integration. An example of such an integration:

Typically, your Funkwhale instance could use your listening history to suggest you a few creators you like that also happen to need help.
Hell, you could even define a monthly budget on Liberapay, connect it to your PeerTube instance, and let PeerTube dispatch your donations based on your views to creators that need it the most!
This is not a new idea: Flattr does that. But it’s centralized.
As a creator, you could share various channels to get your financial contributions: a Liberapay account, a Ğ1 or Bitcoin address, an IBAN, a PayPal account, a Patreon or Tipeee page, a Flattr address…
No need to force your audience to use a specific channel.
Most of this could be semi or fully automatized.

Clearly we miss the monthly/whatever budget broadcasting, but we can already make a simple suggestion based on history. Now, I know we don't store history and don't want to track users, but that would be opt-in anyway and there's no need to track all videos. There's only an interest to store counters for videos we actually can link to an account. And then we can also make the support button active, and only take into account videos whose support button was clicked.

What do you think?