The fediverse has the potential to help create interoperable and long-lasting social networks, but many creators and businesses rely on larger, closed platforms because they offer direct ways to make money from their audiences — something that’s difficult to do in the fediverse right now.
Sub.club He's trying to figure that out.
The idea is that this will allow users of ActivityPub-based platforms like Mastodon to easily offer paid subscriptions and premium content while taking a 6 percent commission on top of payment processing fees. It could solve a big problem the fediverse has right now: it’s not easy to make a living off of it unless you direct your supporters to existing platforms like Patreon that are gated and require users to visit a particular site or app to get much of the content.
Bringing money into the fediverse ecosystem and having a way for creators to get paid could be an important element, says Bart Decrem, one of the founders of sub.club. The edge“We believe this work is critically important for all of us who believe in the promise of the Internet.”
This could be especially true if the fediverse is so successful that it creates what sub.club advisor Anuj Ahooja calls “an ultimate network effect.” This would be the idea of everyone joining fediverse platforms built on an open protocol where it’s possible to interact online with the option to move between networks and platforms at will. “From there, you can drive a lot of innovation around social media,” Ahooja says.
While x remains culturally relevant enough to be the first place Joe Biden’s campaign posted the news that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, many people found out about it on other platforms as it spread across instagram, TikTok, Discord, and WhatsApp. I’m not sure everyone is going to rally in one place or want to, and profiles you can take with you could be part of that.
Currently, sub.club is only available to Mastodon users, and depending on how you use Mastodon, you may encounter the service in different ways. In Mastodon web clients, creators can direct people to a subscription page.
For clients that include a rich subscription experience (currently, these are Mammoth, created by the same team of developers, and Ice Cubes), creators can add a subscription button that appears at the top of their profile and takes users to a subscription webpage.
As a creator, creating the post that your subscribers will see requires an extra step: you need to send a direct message to your sub.club account. Then, people who subscribe to your posts will see that post in their follower feeds.
Sub.club doesn’t just want to incentivize creators to use only its services; instead, the team envisions creating “a subscription button that integrates with other paid subscription products,” Ahooja says. That’s why it’s launching as a developer preview; “if you’re going to build something, do it in a way that’s standard and portable across multiple services,” according to Ahooja.
An API has also been created that can create premium bots, according to These frequently asked questionsso you could, for example, set up a dumb bot that add animals to photos.
Sometime this fall, sub.club also plans to allow Mastodon server admins to use the tool to help fund maintenance rather than asking users for support through platforms like Patreon or Ko-Fi.
“Right now, the fediverse is powered by a lot of free labor,” Ahooja says. “So let’s make sure people are compensated.”
