Ah yes, was waiting for the "you're a bad person for using PayPal" (regardless of reason or feasibility of not doing so), there it is.
Got upgraded all the way to fascist even!
@trumpet sent a report your way.
The irony of saying PayPal users are fascists... on a Mastodon instance... funded by Ko-Fi... via PayPal.
@AVincentInSpace @dragonfi @stella @trumpet Almost everywhere I've seen takes Visa/MasterCard Debit these days. My Wise debit card (MasterCard Debit) is my most reliable card to use online.
Most of the time, as far as I know, the merchants don't even know the difference between credit/debit. I think it used to matter in the past but not so much these days.
@stella IBAN? Amazon Pay? Credit Card? Apple Pay? Wero (which really is just a wrapper for your IBAN)?
Not saying PayPal doesn't have a strong grip here, but there are always alternatives that work.
@gameshack_ @stella Artists usually take PayPal and nothing else. PayPal is also one of the few ways to accept payments without divulging your identity, that doesn't involve outright creating a company (which is a bureaucratic and tax nightmare in some jurisdictions).
@lina @AVincentInSpace @dragonfi @stella @trumpet probably the difference between pure/legacy debit cards like maestro or vpay (which may not even have a card number on them) and visa/mastercard debit which are like credit cards in most ways except that they are debit-backed instead of loan-backed and have lower fees
@lina @AVincentInSpace @dragonfi @stella @trumpet it used to be a huge pain in germany to find a place that gave you the latter because the legacy debit card works for offline transactions and for online transactions you obviously could “just use” bank transfers with the IBAN that is printed on them, while banks are not particularly happy about just handing out loans every month
@AVincentInSpace @dragonfi @lina @stella @trumpet nowadays i got a card that can do it all (germany-only debit, international legacy debit, and new debit) which is handy because to this day there’s still disparities with what you can use where (no cash withdrawal on mastercard/visa, unless it’s debit and a netto, unless that netto has a dog as a mascot. also on atms with a fee. also no tobacco either.)
@AVincentInSpace @dragonfi @lina @stella @trumpet also from what i have heard the lack of online on maestro/vpay is not global
because at least in chile you can use either to pay online. on chilean websites. assuming your card is with a chilean bank.
@charlotte @AVincentInSpace @stella @dragonfi @lina I never knew there was a significant difference between "legacy debit" (Maestro) and "new debit". Was the legacy one significantly different from the technical side?
Back when Maestro and Visa Electron cards used to exist here, they did have card numbers but also worked only with local online retailers.
Nowadays I still have a Mastercard Debit as the bank issues one by default (in addition to having a regular credit card which had to be signed up for separately) but I've never actually tried using it anywhere, expecting it to just not work anyway.
For direct payments I just send money to an IBAN but with online stores it's often a mess whenever I have to do that at work – takes longer to (manually?) verify, some have a different IBAN per bank, sometimes you have to very carefully fill in weird fields and hope you copy/pasted the correct "payment identifier".
@trumpet@mas.to @lina also like. PayPal sucks but I don’t think they’re overtly evil??? unless I’ve missed something big they seem to be “generic mildly evil corporation” and not “oh! that’s blatant fascism” like some
@rexo Ah but you see, it was founded 25 years ago by people some of whom turned out to be fascists today, so that retroactively makes it fascist 🙃
(I'm not kidding, this is the logic this guy used)