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Keppari is a fandom-made, and soon to be fandom-run, open source, non-profit social network. The word keppari is Finnish for 'hobbyhorse,' and I chose the name for this project after seeing this article on Finnish girls' hobbyhorse subculture that used to be secret, but is now celebrated. I want keppari to be a place where you can post about what you love, find other people who enjoy it, and take control of your privacy so you can only share with those you want to share with.
( FAQ )
( How do I help? )
Revenue and paid features
Aug. 16th, 2019 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
powerful_dusk_88623Although Keppari will be incorporated as a US non-profit, the main revenue stream will not be from donations. For long-term stability and accountability to users, payments for paid accounts and paid features will be the main income source. Based on the cost of similar services with premium account tiers, I'm tentatively thinking $3-4/month or $36/year, with a discount for paying for a full year at once. I still need to find an attorney with non-profit experience, but I believe fees for paid accounts and features would not be tax deductible the way a donation would be, since it would be a fee for service similar to purchasing a physical good. This would also probably mean paying sales tax.
For comparison, here are the costs for paid accounts with similar services:
Dreamwidth paid account: $35/year
Dreamwidth premium: $50/year
Reddit premium: $72/year
Reddit gold (prior to 2017?): $30/year
Wordpress.com personal: $60/year
Pillowfort paid account: will update if they announce
Based on conversations with DW's denise, payments will initially be handled through a combination of PayPal, Stripe, and other mainstream payment processors until the organization can build a chargeback history to negotiate with another payment processor who will be more stable. Using PayPal, Stripe, etc runs the risk of being cut off for hosting adult content, but denise advised that cycling payments through different processors and making the payment system processor agnostic will make this a bit less likely. Pillowfort used PayPal from early 2016 through early 2019 before changing processors.
I'm also looking at funding through Patreon, which seems to allow funding for this kind of model and shouldn't have problems with the content, since the Patreon donations would be for the development of the site, not for accessing adult content. Automating Patreon donation integration with the site would require building a hook to their API, which uses a different authorization system than what Keppari currently uses. (Patreon uses OAuth, Keppari uses Devise). This shouldn't be too much of a problem, but would require building.
( Issues with curated ad hosting )
( Issues with a site marketplace )
( Possible paid features )
For comparison, here are the costs for paid accounts with similar services:
Dreamwidth paid account: $35/year
Dreamwidth premium: $50/year
Reddit premium: $72/year
Reddit gold (prior to 2017?): $30/year
Wordpress.com personal: $60/year
Pillowfort paid account: will update if they announce
Based on conversations with DW's denise, payments will initially be handled through a combination of PayPal, Stripe, and other mainstream payment processors until the organization can build a chargeback history to negotiate with another payment processor who will be more stable. Using PayPal, Stripe, etc runs the risk of being cut off for hosting adult content, but denise advised that cycling payments through different processors and making the payment system processor agnostic will make this a bit less likely. Pillowfort used PayPal from early 2016 through early 2019 before changing processors.
I'm also looking at funding through Patreon, which seems to allow funding for this kind of model and shouldn't have problems with the content, since the Patreon donations would be for the development of the site, not for accessing adult content. Automating Patreon donation integration with the site would require building a hook to their API, which uses a different authorization system than what Keppari currently uses. (Patreon uses OAuth, Keppari uses Devise). This shouldn't be too much of a problem, but would require building.
( Issues with curated ad hosting )
( Issues with a site marketplace )
( Possible paid features )
The image problem
Aug. 14th, 2019 11:11 ampowerful_dusk_88623Image hosting, and especially hosting NSFW images, is by far the biggest cost and biggest concern for the long-term sustainability of this project. Below are some thoughts on the image hosting problem, some of which I first posted about on FFA.
The main problem is not the size of each individual upload isn't a problem, although that will have to have some restriction for free users--what I'm looking at right now is a limit of 2MB per image for free users, with the option to pay to have the size cap for individual images increased. The big issue is total uploads per user. Even with something fairly conservative like a lifetime limit of 1GB per user, you're theoretically paying to store that content in perpetuity.
The main problem is not the size of each individual upload isn't a problem, although that will have to have some restriction for free users--what I'm looking at right now is a limit of 2MB per image for free users, with the option to pay to have the size cap for individual images increased. The big issue is total uploads per user. Even with something fairly conservative like a lifetime limit of 1GB per user, you're theoretically paying to store that content in perpetuity.
A very conservative estimate: say there's 10k users and they each upload on average 7 images a month that are 2MB each. At that rate, a user would fill 1GB of space in five years. For the site, that's about 15GB of image storage space a month, which costs about $1.50. That's not so bad, but then the next month you're storing the first 15GB, plus another new 15GB, so the second month you're paying $3. If you don't add any new users, by month 10 it costs almost $300 a month to host all the previously uploaded content.
If (optimistically) about 1% of users get a paid account, image hosting alone outpaces paid account revenue in 10 months if you don't add users. If you keep adding users (and paid accounts at the same rate), it's sustainable for longer, but even then image hosting costs outpace paid account revenue after about three years. The higher the average uploads per user, the sooner hosting costs outpace income.
I've put up some extremely sketchy numbers here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qCojrXN2Aa_P-x35F0hOMWoMtloiJrNyQQlg5WXC2pk/edit?usp=sharing if anyone wants to see the factors. This is really, really sketchy because it doesn't take into account anything like administrative costs, payment processing fees, legal costs, fluctuating numbers of paid accounts, additional revenue from paid community accounts or micropayments, or anything else.
NSFW or potentially NSFW images are the biggest price issue. The host I found that is both not-sketchy and friendly to fandom underage/noncon/etc charges 10 cents for a GB of storage, but Amazon charges .0023 cents for a GB of storage. So for $1, I could get 10GB of storage on the friendly host, or almost 450GB of storage on Amazon. With Amazon prices, image hosting would be sustainable pretty much indefinitely (or at least for about 20 years, which I think is basically the same thing in internet years). I'm trying to figure out the technical feasibility of sending NSFW images to the friendly host and SFW images to Amazon, but it's both a technical and moderation headache that would depend on people accurately flagging their NSFW images. If up to 30 percent of images are NSFW, that pricing would be sustainable for about ten years.
NSFW or potentially NSFW images are the biggest price issue. The host I found that is both not-sketchy and friendly to fandom underage/noncon/etc charges 10 cents for a GB of storage, but Amazon charges .0023 cents for a GB of storage. So for $1, I could get 10GB of storage on the friendly host, or almost 450GB of storage on Amazon. With Amazon prices, image hosting would be sustainable pretty much indefinitely (or at least for about 20 years, which I think is basically the same thing in internet years). I'm trying to figure out the technical feasibility of sending NSFW images to the friendly host and SFW images to Amazon, but it's both a technical and moderation headache that would depend on people accurately flagging their NSFW images. If up to 30 percent of images are NSFW, that pricing would be sustainable for about ten years.
One option that might make both the technical and moderation issues simpler is charging a nominal fee (like $1USD) to allow users to upload NSFW images, in addition to allowing full paid accounts to post NSFW. That would make it easier to offer free users more image hosting space, and make the more expensive NSFW hosting pay for itself. It would probably mean more moderation of posts by free users that aren't flagged NSFW in an attempt to get around the charge, but it might be worth it for the cost sustainability. I'm also not sure if this would be a turn off for users that are used to being able to post all their images for free, or if it would be a turn off for users concerned about connecting wallet names to their NSFW fandom images.
Another option might be to allow free users to exchange their allocation of free image space for a certain number of points that can be used for paid features that are less expensive to the site. For example, if a free user gets 1GB of image hosting space, they could exchange their image hosting space for 10 points, and use those points to get a tag viewer, css customization, personal analytics, or increased number of stored messages in their mailbox, etc. I haven't run the numbers on this yet, so I'm not sure if it would sufficiently offset the image hosting costs to just have some users opt out of posting images.
The other gigantic issue with images is bandwidth usage, which I don't yet know how to estimate well.
Prior posts
Aug. 13th, 2019 10:15 ampowerful_dusk_88623Cross-posted
This is a compilation post of some of the previous discussion I've put out into the world about a possible Network Of Our Own / Fandom Social Network. I (powerfuldusk) am NO3 nonnie in these threads:
first FFA entry - 11/25/18
second FFA entry - 12/8/18
third FFA entry - 12/9/18
fourth FFA entry - 4/9/19
fifth FFA entry - 8/13/19
sixth FFA entry - 8/14/19
I made this demo app. (My current demo host Heroku assigns urls at random, hence my pseud).
A run down of currently built features is available here and the github repo is available here.
This is a compilation post of some of the previous discussion I've put out into the world about a possible Network Of Our Own / Fandom Social Network. I (powerfuldusk) am NO3 nonnie in these threads:
first FFA entry - 11/25/18
second FFA entry - 12/8/18
third FFA entry - 12/9/18
fourth FFA entry - 4/9/19
fifth FFA entry - 8/13/19
sixth FFA entry - 8/14/19
I made this demo app. (My current demo host Heroku assigns urls at random, hence my pseud).
A run down of currently built features is available here and the github repo is available here.
DRAFT Terms of Service
Apr. 22nd, 2019 09:41 pmpowerful_dusk_88623This is a draft Terms of Service that is subject to change. This is not the final version of the Terms of Service.
Don't Like, Don't Read
Everyone has a right to make and share things that they like, even if someone else doesn't like it. Attempting to prevent other users from making, posting or sharing content may result in a warning or a termination of your account.Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That's OK
Everyone likes different things. We have extensive blocking and blacklisting tools; if you see something you don't like, please use them rather than asking that they not be made or posted. You are responsible for your own experience.Tag Your Porn
In order for our safe search function to work, we rely on users to accurately tag their NSFW posts. NSFW means an image or text post includes images of genitals or depictions of death, violence or blood. Users may tag images of breasts as NSFW at their discretion, but this is not required. Posts marked as NSFW will not be displayed to users under 18. If a post is not marked NSFW when it should be, staff will mark it, but the content of the post will not be affected.What's Not Allowed?
Harrassment
Harassment includes posting information or images which identifies a person ('doxxing'), incitement of violence against a user, incitement to self harm, threats of violence or doxxing, inciting others to message a user, the creation of multiple accounts to circumvent blocks or bans, the impersonation of another person or user for the purposes of harassing another person or user, or attempting to prevent a user from making, posting, or sharing content. Violation of this rule may result in a warning or termination of your account.Hate Speech and Incitement to Violence
Images and text which call for violence against a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion or other US federally-protected status are not allowed. Images or text which attacks or defames a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion or other US federally-protected status are not allowed. Violation of this rule may result in a warning or termination of your account.
Photos, GIFs Videos of Porn or Genitals
There's lots of places on the internet to post photos, videos, or gifs of porn, but this isn't one of them. Images are fine if they're illustrated, or if they were produced as part of a movie or television show not intended for pornographic purposes. That means HBO gifs are fine, nudes of your ex or clips of the Captain America porn parody aren't. Images which violate this rule will be removed and accounts posting images which violate this rule will be warned. Accounts which violate this rule repeatedly may be banned.
