Log in with Patreon

[cassidyjames]

I realized this wasn't actually filed. But I wonder if it would be worthwhile or even possible to allow Patreon membership as a way to authenticate? I would guess we would want to use the Patreon API to check if they are the member of a specific tier, or at worst, do it like GitHub Sponsors and check the pledge amount directly.

If this is possible, we should consider adding it as a perk to a new equivalent tier on Patreon (possibly slightly higher because of the Patreon cut).

[polyjitter]

Relevant endpoint:

https://docs.patreon.com/#get-api-oauth2-v2-identity with ?include=memberships

Seems only identity scope would be needed, as it would give only access to the user's member status with the elementary campaign.

Tiers seem to be found under data -> relationships -> currently_entitled_tiers as per:

https://docs.patreon.com/#get-api-oauth2-v2-members-id
https://docs.patreon.com/#member

Possibly just guesswork, as these examples are a mess.

[btkostner]

My long term goal for this was to setup elementary accounts and have people be able to link their github, patreon, and what have you. Then we can just calculate the total amount someone is paying and use that for authentication to our different services.

[cassidyjames]

@btkostner that's interesting! It doesn't let us account for the difference in Patreon's payment processing and revenue share, but maybe that's fine in the long term. I personally like incentivizing GitHub Sponsors over Patreon because of that, but I could also see it being handy to have a single account with other services linked…

[btkostner]

@cassidyjames I was thinking more long term wise we might want to add other subscriptions. We could also take into account the processing price for each service. It's just more logic to live in the accounts service.

This is all long term, and I'm not saying we should work on this now (setting up an oauth server etc is going to be a bit of work), but that was my internal plan for the future.

[cassidyjames]

@btkostner gotcha, that makes sense. I think that yeah, if it's possible to do Patreon as a separate authentication for this site for now, then it might be worth it in the near term. We have been wanting to re-launch some Patreon tiers anyway, and this would be a good thing to mention as part of that.