And creators like @thelinuxEXP have mentioned multiple times that the lack of financial incentives to post their content on e.g. PeerTube vs. YouTube acts as a deterrent for many.
And the Fediverse community in general has already a strong sense of “reward-based” ethics - many already make LibrePay/Patreon donations to their instance admins and favourite content creators, so why not embed such ability in the protocol itself and bypass the middlemen?
Allowing micropayments in ActivityPub (per-post, one-off, recurrent etc.) would actually attract many creators who are currently stuck against their will on proprietary platforms, are at the mercy of YouTube’s mercurial monetization algorithms, don’t have much freedom in deciding how they want to get paid, and have to give back a non-negligible share of their revenue to the platform itself.
Imagine instead a world where micropayments are handled at protocol level itself, a piece of content or a profile that requires the user to make a payment would transparently respond with an HTTP 402, the money would move from the donor’s account to the contributor’s without any middlemen to shave off profits, no external algorithms are in charge of what can be monetized and how, and creators don’t even have to worry about posting the same content across multiple different platforms because ActivityPub would take care of the whole distribution problem. I can’t think of a better silver bullet to get content creators to do the jump.
The thing is that if we don’t implement this right on the protocol level because we oppose commercialization on ideological grounds, then Threads may implement it anyway on their version of ActivityPub (and then yes, it’d really be E-E-E), and content creators who do content creation as a job have one more reason to avoid the Fediverse.
I’ve got a bit more of a mixed feeling about ads instead. There’s sensitivity on the Fediverse about donations and micropayments, but almost everyone here hates the ad-based business model to the core. If the payments idea and implementation works right, then I don’t think we need to pollute our walls with such low-quality littering. I’m happy to leave that to Threads if they want to implement it, because I really don’t see much of added value in it and I don’t see why anybody out there would like that idea.