 The American #BuyMeACoffee payment platform sanctioned Ukrainian creators banning them from receiving money, because... ...their country got invaded. "The cited reason appears to be "because Russia occupies 20% of your country" It's really ridiculous how "global" payment platforms can hurt already vulnerable people because they don't want to deal with legal messes. Something @pluralistic mentioned multiple times in his writing. 18 comments
@alxd Is Stripe blocked, too? Otherwise you might take @Liberapay into consideration. :Blobhaj: @tizian @Liberapay Stripe is Blocked, Paypal is blocked for commercial use.  @alxd Furthermore, there seems to be a comprehensive list of donation platforms in the following: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding @ainali @Liberapay LiberaPay uses Patreon (cannot be used commercially) and Stripe (I don't know)  @alxd I have bought things from Ukraine through Etsy, but also through the shop.brave.ua platform. That is no longer in operation but links to sellers directly now. It may be worth a look what type of payment methods those sellers use. Another path might be an Estonian e-company, so that most your payments run through an EU account, and you only figure out the payment from there into Ukraine.  @ton @alxd PBACC is on Etsy now too it seems (previously their own site): https://www.etsy.com/listing/1233530362/plastic-bottle-cutter-pbacc  @alxd my friend linked Base by mono to me and said it should work, but he's not sure (nonetheless, there's value converted to euro in some example he sent, so chances are pretty high)  I have mixed feelings on this one. It absolutely sucks for Ukrainians, of course. But OFAC and similar sanctions specify an embargo on Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. If any system, subprocessor, or service can't make the region distinction, and can only identify Ukraine as a whole, and you can't replace it easily, you find yourself in a tough spot of blocking all of Ukraine or needing to shutdown all US operations. @smeg @pluralistic I'm not arguing whether the legal implementation of the sanctions is correct. I want just to point out that sanctions which hurt the vulnerable people as much (if not more) as the aggressors are actively harmful.  @alxd In this regard my conclusion is that there is more sense to not use a global payment platforms at all and take a special attention to locally available ways to accept payments available in your own country, including some APIs or services in bank where you have account.  @alxd @pluralistic True, but the alternative is "corporations have more power than nation-states" and I'm not entirely sure we want that either... @mark @pluralistic is it, really? Or could we devise a way of implementing sanctions not harming the victims? |
Gregory's Server
If you have any recommendations for Ukrainian artists on how they could legally accept international payments, I have multiple friends who will be grateful for any lead.
Currently Patreon and Paypal don't allow any kind of commercial payments to Ukraine and very few other platforms allow transfers to Ukrainian bank accounts.