Archive for August 8, 2018

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Patreon Acquires Memberful

Wyatt Jenkins:

At Patreon, we’re building a world-class membership platform that enables creators to own the relationship with their fans. We feel that creators should decide how and when they engage with their fans, where they build their community, and how they run their business. And, for some creators, that also means managing a fully branded membership program on their own website. That’s why, today, we’re thrilled to announce that we have acquired Memberful, adding a self-service white label membership solution to our growing product portfolio.

Patreon and Memberful share a mission to fund the creative class and we both understand there are a variety of platforms and business models available to achieve that goal. Together, we’ll now be able to offer a wider range of options for building and managing a successful membership program.

Ben Thompson interviews the two CEOs:

Long-time Stratechery members may recall that three years ago — a year into the Daily Update — I ripped out the old buggy membership system and installed a new-to-the-market SaaS product called Memberful. It was one of the best decisions I have made, and over the years I have recommended Memberful to the many folks that have asked me about the software I use to run their own subscription site.

Jason Snell:

I realize that this is a bit inside baseball, but I’ve been using Memberful for the membership programs for both Six Colors and The Incomparable for a couple of years. In fact, the above paragraph describes me perfectly: I didn’t want to use Patreon, I wanted to build two membership programs myself and integrate them directly with my two sites. Memberful let me do that.

Update (2018-08-09): Stephen Hackett:

I wasn’t shocked by the news. Memberful is a great product, but isn’t a huge company. In fact, according to TechCrunch, it has only about 500 paying users. As you may know, I use Memberful here at 512 Pixels, and it’s what powers the Relay FM membership as well. As such, I approach this news with two thoughts.

First, if this lets Memberful continue to grow and expand, that’s good for everyone who uses it. The acquisition does come with a price increase for new customers, and I hope that doesn’t slow growth. A healthy Memberful means it is more likely to stick around and not be absorbed into Patreon.

Firefox’s New DNS Resolution

ungleich (via Rob Griffiths, Hacker News):

With their next patch Mozilla will introduce two new features to their Firefox browser they call “DNS over HTTPs” (DoH) and Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR). In this article we want to talk especially about the TRR.

[…]

When Mozilla turns this on by default, the DNS changes you configured in your network won’t have any effect anymore. At least for browsing with Firefox, because Mozilla has partnered up with Cloudflare, and will resolve the domain names from the application itself via a DNS server from Cloudflare based in the United States. Cloudflare will then be able to read everyone’s DNS requests.

Patrick McManus:

While sophisticated users can turn to cloud-based “open resolvers” that offer better privacy controls than what is available by default from most internet service providers (ISPs), these resolvers rely on the same old unencrypted protocols so ISPs can often intercept data anyway.

Our first effort to upgrade the privacy of DNS is to implement the DNS over HTTPS (DoH) protocol, which encrypts DNS requests and responses. See Lin Clark’s terrific explainer about how DNS over HTTPS can really improve the state of the art.

[…]

Firefox does not yet use DoH by default.

Spotlight Parser

Yogesh Khatri (tweet):

This code reads and extracts data from macOS spotlight databases.