Sub.club, which allows fediverse creators to offer paid subscriptions and premium content and launched in late August, is already closing. “Unfortunately we will close this project in the coming weeks,” says the sub.club team. announced last week. Creators using the service will receive “full payment,” but sub.club feeds will stop working “at the end of January.”
As I wrote when I first covered sub.club, the service seemed like an interesting way to allow fediverse folks to more easily monetize their audience without having to steer them toward other platforms like Patreon. But the group that built it, the BLVD, ran out of funds.
“Unfortunately, we were not able to quickly gain enough traction with product-to-market adaptation/adoption to sub.clubor to attract investors, associations, etc.,” says Bart Decrem, founder of the BLVD. The edge in an email. It says more than 150 creators were on sub.club. “He remains optimistic about fediverso, and Bluesky's success is a great thing, but it looks like it will take a while to connect all the pieces.”
“As we see more users join platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads and the open ecosystem grows, the need will eventually arise for a subscription service that is not tied to a single platform, is protocol-based and allows the user portability,” says sub.club advisor Anuj Ahooja. “Hopefully sub.club, or a similar service, can fill the gap at that time.”
Due to the lack of BLVD funding, it is pulling the plug Also in two other projects: Mammoth, an open source iOS app for Mastodon, and moth.social, a Mastodon instance that is the complementary server for Mammoth. At the end of November, the Mammoth Mastodon story he said that Mammoth “now operated without funding or a paid team.”
