Gethly
Hosting and sales platform for digital content creators
2 followers
Hosting and sales platform for digital content creators
2 followers
Gethly is a hosting and sales platform for digital content creators. Sell digital goods, build online communities with forums and group chats via paid memberships or accept donations. Gethly also works as payment gateway for self-hosted content. Charge only 1 cent for your content, if you want to!
Gethly is a hosting and sales platform for digital content creators.
The main goal was to build a platform for content creators to host and sell their digital content, as well as build their own communities in a single place. All of this with few important points in mind:
avoid imposing own ethical, philosophical or religious views onto platform's business partners - the content creators
get out of the business relationship of the content creator and content consumer as much as possible
avoid reliance on 3rd parties
fair pricing
give content creators all-in-one-place functionality for the digital world
As far as content goes, the platform has very few rules - no illegal content(duh), no nudity and no repulsive content.
When it comes to finances, the platform charges flat fee of 10% from realised sales and is charged only during a payout process, which is triggered automatically once per month or manually whenever the creator desires. The platform is free, so if creator makes no sales, there are no fees to pay for content hosting.
Importantly, the platform uses digital wallets, which the users must charge via bank transfer(preferably instant SEPA payments via banking apps) in order to be able to make a purchase, making this advantageous in regards to low fees and privacy, as no payment processor is involved during each payment. It limits risk of funds being misplaced or users' cards charged without consent. This allows the platform to set no minimum price limits - creators can charge a single cent if they desire. But it also means that for certain actions, we have to perform a one-time KYC verification - specifically when becoming a publisher or for withdrawing funds.
Every creator can have limitless amount of channels through which they can publish and sell their content. This allows them to run multiple channels focused on different user bases and topics. Each channel can have staff - some creators might run an umbrella business that provides anonymity to authors that do not wish to have their business details publicly accessible. As stated before, the platform does not want to involve itself where it should not be, hence the taxes and legal aspects of sales are fully the responsibility of the content creators.
Some people have nothing to sell but they have a following. In this case, such creators can run a membership-only forum and/or group chat. Having content to sell is not a requirement to be a content creator on the platform. Same goes for donations.
Gethly also supports OAuth for purposes of serving as payment gateway with access control functionality to self-hosted content, which too can be sold via the platform just like a hosted content.
Some useful links:
FAQ: https://gethly.com/page/faq (recommended read)
ToS: https://gethly.com/page/tos
Blog: https://gethly.com/blog
Discord: https://discord.gg/jxtRMayw7E
The Gethly platform does not aim to be a competition to established brands but rather an alternative to keep in your back pocket, in case something goes wrong.
The impulse to build this platform came from not so great user experience when using the major platforms. Also the waves of deplatforming never sit well with me as most, if not all, were politically motivated and were not a legal issue. Also having users being sent to various 3rd party platforms for additional functionality, like live group chat or buying an e-book, always felt wrong. So Gethly aims to provide a cushy place for content creators to have everything right under their fingertips and not have to set up multiple accounts all over the internet and spread their fan/customer bases.
Adding the OAuth and OIDC functionality was added mostly to serve those creators whom might have trust issues due to previous bad experiences witch such platforms, so they can self-host but still use the platform to make sales and get access control, just like they would for Gethly-hosted content.
A lot of technical information can be found on the linked blog. But in short, back-end is written in Go, database of choice is MariaDB, front-end is Quasar, Gethly uses its own CDN and video processing, custom proxy layer protects against future DDOS of important systems, at the core of the platform is event-sourcing and CQRS and the whole platform is currently running on 12 servers.