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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

Now that you mention it Bluesky might actually find some adoption if they allowed monetizing private feeds (Is twitter doing this? I know you can monetize via subscriptions but AFAIK it's not a paywall, more of a tip). They'd compete for marketshare with patreon, substack and onlyfans combined.

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The Bluesky protocol doesn't really allow non-public posts (which is why blocking doesn't work the way some people would like it to, and why there can't be features like Circles)

I believe Twitter does support paid private posts that you can subscribe to, but I've never seen anyone I follow use it

Substack has this working.

I have some paid substack blogs in my RSS feed. Some give you part of the post in the feed and then you have to click on the post to see the rest (in you’re a subscriber, else not). Others just say “click here to read” and again, if you are a subscriber (I am) you see the post.

I’m surprised they don’t just use private RSS feeds for posts like they do for podcasts.

This approach acts like a sales tool, which I think is better all around.

There are Telegram bots that do paywall private channels, a few examples I can mention:

- InviteMember (accepts most payment methods, including Stripe)

- CanalFans (accepts only USDT, and it's only available in Spanish, South American focused)

The way they work is that you add them to your private channel and the bot executes the sale, invites the member and kicks them out if they don't renew their subscription.

Of course they take a commission on the sales.

On a small scale, it’s probably also quite straightforward to roll your own using Telegram’s built-in bot payments API (which acts as a gateway to a number of processors including Stripe). Not sure if one should, but it’s a possibility.

I've looked into it from the technical side, and it's not that straightforward.

I mean, yes, it's on the scope of a toy project, but it's definitely not on the scope of a weekend project.

My software development estimation looks like at least 2-3 months with at least 3 hours daily on the IDE (on the Subscription Management side, ignoring the payment gateway, that as you mentioned: it's on Telegram already).

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