A New Platform for Online Sex Workers

Background

As a trans person, sex workers have been a close part of my community for a long time. It's hard for us to find good jobs, and sex work turns out to be often preferable to service or other jobs filled with misgendering and abuse.

So much sex work happens online these days, and so much of it is terribly exploitative, with high fees, poor moderation tools, (gross) fetishization, and general insecurity about whether the platform will even treat these workers as a priority as they grow.

The Idea

My idea here is that we build a platform for these sex workers with image and video upload support, and/or potentially live video, multi-worker videos, etc. And do this in an anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and queer/trans-friendly way.

Challenges

The biggest challenge, aside from the competitive space (see below), is that it's hard to find high-quality, reliable payment processors. Stripe and similar are not available because they (and most, really) ban sex work payments. We'll need to figure out who to use.

Prior Art/Competitive Space

Obviously, the biggest elephant here is OnlyFans (who, annoyingly, uses Stripe and gets away with it, ugh). Besides that, there's a massive amount of porn sites out there that we'd be competing with, but I hope that we can lean more on social media for bringing people in, much like I believe OF does.

I know there's another co-op working on this, peep.me, but they're UK-based, for one, and it sounds like we could definitely find ways to support their efforts.

Conclusion

What does everyone think? Would you be interested in pursuing this idea? Is this something you have the skillset and/or connections to build effectively? I know we have a lot of web folks in the Discord, and there's several Elixir/Phoenix devs (and Ruby and Python devs). I'd love to hear your thoughts and contributions!