Discussion
Looking into Patreon community tools and not finding much that looks great, to be honest.
Do any of you have suggestions for community/discussion tools that offer direct integration with Patreon?
The ones I can find that seem to offer the most direct integration are Discourse and Discord and neither seems ideal.
Also I don't use either of them so setting one or the other up would involve a learning curve (also Discourse hosting seems quiet expensive).
@baldur I haven't had any need to look at Patreon integration, but FWIW:
Discord and Discourse are very different creatures. Discord is a chat room firehose on a platform owned and controlled by someone else. Discourse is an organized, searchable forum that can be self-hosted.
I've been running full-featured open-source Discourse on a VPS for just $13 USD/mo and it's been great -- just gotta do the occasional backup & update.
There's a learning curve, esp. for initial self-hosting setup. But once you've done that (or hired it done) the admin can be minimal. It's full of features to let users help moderate so it doesn't require constant babysitting.
@baldur What would be the goal you want to achieve? A space for subscribers to discuss things? Announcements? Exclusive content?
@dimenzio I basically got an email suggesting that it could be a space for like-minded people to discuss things. So it'd be purely a discussion venue.
The thought of managing a community also gives me a mild anxiety attack, though, so I'm not exactly eager to jump into this, if I'm to be perfectly honest.
I don't use any chat apps to speak of myself, except for with close friends and family, so I'm quite anxious about being able to manage anything of the sort for a Patreon.
@baldur tl;dr it's all pretty shit.
Patreon has one job: collect creator money and take a cut.
Unfortunately they took venture funding, so GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH and stupid ideas are the order of the day.
I know Andrew Hickey of 500songs.com who has a top 0.01% patreon, and they don't listen to him asking them not to fuck up his business either.
So I would not hitch all your wagons to Patreon.
I haven't set up a backup funding account (SubscribeStar maybe?) but I could. Might do that for Ko-Fi though, which is good for one-off donations.
@davidgerard Yeah. My current plan is to aim for a mix of ebook sales (and similar single-purchase digital things), print sales (working on paperback editions), Patreon, and YouTube earning
I'm eyeing SteadyHQ as a backup for Patreon but it basically has no integrations
My hope is to have a bigger chunk of my income come from something that's less variable month to month, so I'm basically looking at what my options are for boosting the Patreon from the close-to-zero that it is currently.
@baldur @davidgerard For digital products/sales/subs, I've heard good things about Lemon Squeezy, but not used it myself... (their whole spiel seems to be eCommerce features for devs)
@baldur main thing is: don't make a rod for your own back
Why does everything in this space come across as so damn sleazy?
@baldur Frankly, Discord's eagerness to railroad me into using other platforms I didn't want meant that removing it in toto was a no-brainer
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
@baldur Discourse has its issues but depending on your needs the free hosted plan may be sufficient. I’ve been using this with one of my newsletters for a couple years now. (I use Memberful instead of Patreon and it ties into that nicely.)