There used to be this service called Flattr, and it's still around, but I'm honestly not sure how it works anymore. The way it used to work is you set a monthly amount you're willing to contribute, you get to specify which projects to support, either one time, or recurring, and then your contribution is split up between the projects you chose to support.

I don't know if this is an ideal system, because some creators might end up staying unsupported even though people are using their creations, others end up reminding their audience constantly to use the service and support them, so they end up with more than a similar creator not reminding their audience.

In the end, I think the best thing for all creators would would be universal basic income. Everyone is taken care of such they can survive and pay for necessities, and then they can just create stuff for others to enjoy, for free. (Oh, the humanity!) No trying to convince people to share part of their hard-earned money just for basic survival.

It's not like others have not already though about this, but there are a lot of legal and organizational problems with pooling and passing through money like this, and once you reach a certain scale all sorts of anti-money laundry regulation become an issue as well.

Well, that's all great. But the big problem with these kinds of platforms is always that hosting all this data (especially videos) is extremely expensive. It's not necessarily impossible that donations+ads+subs can cover all the infrastructure costs, but generally there's a need for some sort of big capital backing. Open Source is not something that gets that sort of private investment.

But hey maybe. I'd absolutely love that.

The model is pretty successful anyway, some people here have mentioned Pixiv and Nebula.

I believe Pixiv is exactly what you describe for artists, but not open source.

I think https://nebula.tv/ does that? Good idea and should be done more. But from my perspective as a user it just feels like bad and limited YouTube app without sponsorblock.

Improving mitra or building some kind of addon to peertube could work.

That was kinda the original idea behind micro transactions (minus the gradual decline, if anything that's the other way around). And it just never worked I guess.