Sharks are cool and comfortable!
Elden Thing | Back & Body Hurts Platinugggggh Rewards Member
Profile pic and banner credits: sharkaeopteryx art by @superkiak! eggbug by eggbug! Mash-up by me!
[Alt-text for pfp: a cute sharkaeopteryx sat on the ground with legs out, wings down, jaw ajar, and hed empty, looking at eggbug and eggbug's enigmatic smile.]
[Alt-text for banner: a Spirit Halloween banner with eggbug and the sharkaeopteryx that Superkiak drew for me looking at it with inscrutable expressions]
I'm a Vietnamese cis woman born and currently living in the U.S. You may know me from Sandwich, from Twitter or Mastodon (same username), or on Twitch as Sharkaeopteryx. I do not have a Discord or Bluesky account.
Ask me about language learning/teaching, cooking/eating food, late diagnosis ADHD, and volunteer small business mentoring. Or don't, I'm not the boss of you.
I think people deserve to be young, make mistakes, and grow without being held to standards they don't know about yet and are still learning. So, if you are under 22, please don't try to strike up a friendship or get involved in discussions on my posts.
Please don't automatically assume I follow/know/co-sign someone just because I reposted something from them—sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Also, if you think being removed as a follower when we're not mutuals is a cardinal sin, please do not follow me.
It feels like we're just a few years away from needing to bring back sneakernet
I wrote about the problem here: https://cohost.org/mrhands/post/1843405-great-question-unf
Essentially, every website needs to use Mastercard or Visa to process payments, and especially the former is under the influence of a lobbying group that aims to remove all adult content from the Internet. They're slowly but surely succeeding, by the way.
I think that every NSFW content creator who wants to be able to sell their material online should consider picking up HTML and building their own website, or hiring a porn-friendly web dev to do it for them. It's a necessary skill at this point.
Dead serious, Gumroad was the only worthwhile storefront IMO that openly hosted NSFW art sales. Besides Subscribestar, which isn't a storefront but a subscription model, we don't have a lot when it comes to displaying and selling physical media especially. Gumroad itself was never great for that either, tbh, but at least it was allowed.
FreeCodeCamp is where I've been trying to learn in my spare time, maybe it will help someone: https://www.freecodecamp.org/
yeah that's a good question given that it's the payment processors pushing all of this
So, this is a reasonable concern and one that I promise I didn't forget about, but honestly it's just more complicated...there are some things we just don't have as much control over. That being said!
Way I see it right now is one of three options. Keep in mind I'm US-based and I got a lot of these sites I found from this somewhat outdated Github thread.
If your business is at a point where you can afford to do this, consider applying for an explicitly high-risk payment processor like Pay Diverse or Payment Cloud. This is the safest option, imo, but I'm not at a place where I feel like it's worthwhile for me to do it yet.
Do research into the TOS's of free payment processors that are not Square, Paypal, and Stripe. I use Wave--yes, it has an Obscenity Clause, but there's a ton of legal grey area with what defines "obscenity" vs "erotica" that it's certainly better than the alternatives. I know there are other choices, but I haven't looked into them as deeply.
Still an option: Continue operating under-the-table on a more hostile payment processor and site host, and just list NSFW items as vaguely as possible--no images, descriptions, etc. Don't link the account to your socials on that website, but you can redirect customers from your NSFW socials there, and provide examples on your socials of what the items actually are. This is...clunky. But, hey, that's the world we live in.
In terms of a concrete, proven method of connecting a payment processor of your choice to your NSFW website and the success rate of doing so without that support being pulled, that is beyond me currently. I'm no coder, really, I am only a porn artist with dreams ^^' but I'm guessing you'd have an easier time with these methods.
This makes me wonder about the possibility of someone creating a financial institution explicitly to cater to NSFW creators. Or if American Express or Discover or some other existing org could commit to freedom of expression and gain a whole new niche market.
There is also Pillowfort, which considers itself NSFW and adult content friendly and is user funded, which means that is unlikely to change.
Itch is still willing to keep adult content on their platform. For now. 👌
I can actually possibly Patient Zero this further, maybe, unless im stupid and forgor:
The Patriot Act.
there was a LOT of changes to how financial institutions are regulated, and can behave, with that absolute schlock of bullshit, and one of the biggest is a pseudo-formal 'deputization' of financial institutions, to ensure that they are not being used for illegal actions. This is why they have a lot of freedom in how they freeze assets, or refuse to serve individuals, and et cetera. That ALSO opened them up to a lot more litigation in terms of what people use them for, and that expands outwards. That big fat packet of law is why they got that much more uppity about questionable content -- because now, if they are getting threats of action about it, whether legal or otherwise, not only are they able to take action to remove it, it protects them, by them doing so.
