After two and a half years of this membership program, I’ve built a proper site for its members.
When I first started the program, I debated whether I should use Patreon or roll my own site with Memberful (a backend for membership programs, also now owned by Patreon). I thought that folks might trust Patreon more, but I was uneasy with giving up control over how the program is run, and how posts and emails appear. I was particularly nervous for changes that might be introduced down the line that don’t make sense for my members, but at that point I’d be somewhat stuck.
These kinds of changes have come to pass, such as this one caused by Apple, because Patreon offers an iOS app. That’s not to say that there are no problems with being locked into Memberful; they recently doubled their price, in addition to taking a percent of every payment, citing a growing list of features that I don’t use (website creation tools, generated signup page, referral programs, etc.).
After two and a half years of this membership program, I’ve built a proper site for its members.
When I first started the program, I debated whether I should use Patreon or roll my own site with Memberful (a backend for membership programs, also now owned by Patreon). I thought that folks might trust Patreon more, but I was uneasy with giving up control over how the program is run, and how posts and emails appear. I was particularly nervous for changes that might be introduced down the line that don’t make sense for my members, but at that point I’d be somewhat stuck.
These kinds of changes have come to pass, such as this one caused by Apple, because Patreon offers an iOS app. That’s not to say that there are no problems with being locked into Memberful; they recently doubled their price, in addition to taking a percent of every payment, citing a growing list of features that I don’t use (website creation tools, generated signup page, referral programs, etc.).
The rest of this lab report is for members of the Little Lab.
For the last several months, I've been living in an itemized personal computing environment that increasingly expresses the kinds of ideas that I've long sought for desktop-class computing in my life.
In this lab report, we consider one way to look at the architecture for the itemized user environment: a layering that has been happening since the dawn of time.
