A new service from the developers of Mastodon's Mammoth app aims to bring a creator economy to the Fediverse, also known as the open social web. Sub.club, which launches on Thursday, will allow creators on Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter/X rival, to offer paid subscriptions and content through premium feeds. In addition to supporting creators, sub.club believes premium feeds could also be used for other purposes, such as supporting helpful bots or raising funds to maintain community Mastodon servers, for example.
The latter is especially useful because today the Fediverse is made up of independent servers interconnected to form a decentralized, open social web that includes Mastodon and other services. These servers tend to be community-supported, which can be a challenge when it comes to funding.
Developed over the past few months, sub.club is sharing engineering and design resources with Mammoth, a Mastodon app backed by Mozilla, Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce's Marc Benioff. While some Fediverse backers don't like venture capital or commercial companies entering their field, Mammoth co-founder Bart Decrem believes putting money into the Fediverse could help it thrive.
Decrem acknowledged that the idea would likely face some backlash, but said Mastodon and ActivityPub, the protocols that underpin the Fediverse, may need more resources.
“We think it's important for the ecosystem to thrive that there's an avenue to provide premium content to build businesses here,” he said. “That's a fundamental belief.”
sub.club allows Mastodon users to set up their own premium feeds at any price and enable other users to subscribe to them over the web. Designed to run on the ActivityPub platform, sub.club creates feeds that can be used from within any Mastodon client on the web. It also provides an API that allows Mastodon app developers to natively integrate these feeds into their own mobile and desktop apps. Third-party developer Thomas Ricouard, who created the Ice Cubes Mastodon app for iOS and Mac, will be the first to implement subscription feeds.
Image credit: sub.club
“We're excited to contribute to the creator economy on Mastodon and the Fediverse with our expansion of Ice Cubes,” Liquado told TechCrunch, “and we believe sub.club will help fund a wide range of creators and services on the Fediverse, which is much needed.”
Sub.club will also be rolling out to the Mammoth app starting Friday, allowing users to subscribe to paid feeds from creators with the click of a button.
When a user clicks to follow a subscription-based feed, they receive a direct message linking to a payment page on the web. Payments are currently made through Stripe, but in the future, sub.club may add support for other payment providers.
To make money, sub.club takes a 6% commission on transactions, which is lower than the 8% or 12% that Patreon takes on subscriptions through its Pro and Premium plans, respectively.
Decrem said sub.club differs from Patreon in other ways as well, as it's more of a “backend service” than Patreon is a destination for discovering content.
(Still, it's worth noting that Apple is currently forcing Patreon to use an in-app purchasing system or risk being removed from the App Store, so Sub.club may be able to fly under the radar, at least for now.)
Image credit: sub.club
Sub.club's potential could grow alongside the open social web: Once Meta's Threads is fully integrated with ActivityPub, it could bring a new kind of creator into the Fediverse, and they'll likely be looking for monetization methods other than advertising that the Fediverse generally eschews (though Threads may not do that).
Declem believes this is a potentially monetizable activity, which is why Mammoth and sub.club parent company The Blvd. Inc. are seeking a seed round of funding.
“Once people start building little apps, you'll see entrepreneurial activity and money will start flowing through the system, and I think that's exciting for investors,” Declem said.
Under Elon Musk's direction, X (formerly Twitter) has worked to help creators gain visibility and generate revenue from their posts and videos. But it has struggled to retain advertisers amid the frequency of controversial and harmful content being shared. As a result, the company has encouraged posts that generate a lot of replies, which can be eligible for revenue sharing. This has resulted in more clickbait across the platform and the dilution of more valuable conversations.
Mastodon, meanwhile, has been largely immune to efforts to monetize posts, instead supporting itself through Patreon, grants, and more recently, merchandise.
It remains to be seen whether the Fediverse will actually embrace paid content.
Sub.club (not to be confused with RevenueCat's Sub Club) is initially available as a developer preview, and this fall it plans to roll out tools that allow Mastodon server owners to financially support their instances. For this product, sub.club will waive its own fees and Stripe's fees for the first 90 days.
Early adopters of the premium feed include the premium bot “Pups Where They Don't Belong” and the account of developer and sub.club advisor Anuj Ahooja.