Principle

The web is a wonderful resource. My personal website tries to be a modest contribution to the bigger picture. I put a lot of efforts into it yet leave it all accessible for anybody free of charge. I do hope it helped a few and will continue to in the future. Hosting a website is not free regardless of how it is done. You always have to pay at minimum for the computer running it (even if in the cloud), the electricity to make it compute (even if using solar pannels at home, to install and maintain them) and last but not least for the connection itself (even if you become an autonomous system you will still have interconnection costs at the exchange). Consequently in addition to the time I spend adding content, curating it, maintening the software stack, which to be honest are all part of a learning process and thus beneficial to my own growth, a free website is never free of charge for the owner.

A growing model for the last decades have been to miminize the discomfort of the reader. Nobody enjoys doing a bank transfer and wait for days to clear to get content. Credit cards made that slighly more efficient so we only have to wait seconds. Yet, more often than not when exploring new content, we are unsure if it is truly worth either the efforts or the price. What about not paying then? What initially sounded like an amazing idea grew into a monster that is going as far as challenging our democracy.

While "not paying" sure initially "feels" nice it rapidly becomes disgusting. I believe pirating is the least worst option. You try something, steal it without attacking someone but you also show no appreciation to everybody involved in the work. If the work is of low quality then so be it. You tried, it was a failure, you move on. If it is good though, the more you appreciate the work, the more unacceptable not retributing the author feels. What about introducing someone who would pay on your behalf? Here comes advertisers. Nobody likes ads but when you are so excited by content you don't dare move an inch or look away, it becomes barely bearable. Unfortunately advertising online radically change the game for one fundamental reason : broadcast is blunt.

Advertising online morphed when tailoring the message to the viewer was sold to advertiser as the magical weapon. Advertisers run in a constant challenge of aquiring and keeping attention. Habituation makes us all gradually imune to noise, we filter it out. That's terrible when your product is noise. The magic came in the realisation that one could show ads to people who actually care about a product. Unfortunately what initially started as common sense gradually became an arm-race to surveillance. The better the person seeing the ad would be categorize, the more expensive the ad. Entire online empires were built on that premise. The competition to always gathered more data, more frequent data, more precise data in all possible ways gave rise to surveillance capitalism.

This was a mistake. It might have cost us elections in the largest democracies but it doesn't mean it is the only way.

We could go back to sending a check, became mutual patrons or ... we could pay constantly for what we appreciate. Technically speaking there are multiple of ways but for now WebMonetization, the W3C standard, is running on this website.

If you are enabling it, a sincere thank you. It is not going to cover the costs of the server but symbolically it is very important : it shows that learned helplessness does not apply to the web.

The web is a network of connected knowing actors. Every time you behave in a way that you feel morally and ethically adequate you feel better but you also help to enable the world you thing is right. Thank you.

How it works

Web Monetization streams money from your account to mine. Because doing it directly would be unpractical different actors are involved including extension developers to measure how long you spend on each website that support it, e.g. Coil, payment gateways e.g. GateHub or even cryptocurrency ledger e.g Ripple. Note that those actors are only practical examples. What matters is that they work today, you can stream money that you can then spend or exchange, but also that you do not have to rely on them.

How to contribute here

Create and Coil account, add the extension to your browser then enjoy this websites and others knowing that you are helping to transition the web to healthier business models, one streamed payment at a time.

Alternatively you can also directly support weekly via https://liberapay.com/utopiah/

How to make it work on your website

You can check the source of this web page but overall there are 2 parts :

  • a code snippet that let the browser extension that the page can receive payment and a what address
  • another code snippet that shows and hides messages and content based on the status, monetizing or not.

SideBar import

Web Monetization enabled, thanks for your support!

Web Monetization is not enabled. To learn about it and support this website financially check Monetization.

See also