Open Source X and Thread competitor Mastodon begins experimenting with a new way to raise funds: in-app donations. On Wednesday, the organization announced it would launch a campaign to introduce banners within Android and iOS apps, urging users to make financial contributions.
Initially, this feature is only visible on Mastodon.social and mastodon.online on Mastodon servers that the nonprofit itself runs on. These banners are easy to dismiss and are only shown to those who have an account that has been around for at least four weeks, says Mastodon. The organization promises not to continue encouraging users to donate as well.
Campaigns like this work well for large nonprofit organizations. For example, the Wikimedia Foundation brings the majority of funds from individual donors, including people who donate via pop-up banners that sometimes appear on Wikipedia. However, Mastodon has a much smaller user base, with 8.1 million registered accounts and less than 1 million monthly active users. Still, banners can encourage people who are not actively seeking ways to contribute. This is to make the process more seamless as an in-app feature.
Mastodon says that they will later extend the campaign to the web and, if successful, make it available to all other Mastodon instances. The latter helps keep operations running as individual server administrators can receive direct support from their users.
As an open and decentralized social media platform, Mastodon faces challenges when it comes to financial support. Unlike Meta and X, which are supported by ads, Mastodon has relied heavily on donations from Patreon so far. We have also accepted funds focused on open source over the years and several donations from the foundation.
In 2023, Mastodon raised 545,000 euros in total donations, up 65% year-on-year, while Patreon's donor base fell nearly 23%. (The 2024 report has not yet occurred.) The decline has led to people looking at more aggressive fundraising tactics, particularly as newcomers such as competition with meta and startups backed by VCs.
“We know that raising money can present complexity and questions,” says Mastodon's blog post. “We want to come up with a way to do this well with our community. This is not a corporate fundraising campaign. This is an effort to ensure a more ethical and independent social web future.”