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3 months ago
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Mastodon has published a new blog post outlining the challenges it's currently facing and that it will now be taking "deliberate" steps to make it clear that it needs donations to keep pushing forward. The social network, in a post from its team, claims that unlike other parts of the internet that are "funded by venture capital and advertising," the fediverse, which Mastodon runs on, is "one built for its users, not corporate interests".
For now, if you have an account older than four weeks and use the Android or iOS apps on servers like Mastodon.social and mastodon.online, you'll start seeing a banner asking for a donation. There's also plans to bring the banner to the web in the future. The banner can be easily dismissed, so you will not be repeatedly prompted. The goal is to see if this method of fundraising feels right for the community before expanding it any further.
Looking ahead, Mastodon says that it will bring this fundraising option to other servers and it would help the admins of those servers receive money from their users. This would give individual instance administrators, the people actually running the small communities that make up the Fediverse, a tool to seek support from their own user base.
Each admin could then decide whether to enable the feature for their community, helping them with their own long-term viability without having to rely on just their own pockets.
This arrangement might remind you of the banner you see at the top of a Wikipedia page once in a while. Since open source projects lack traditional income streams, they need donations to cover things like operational costs, software development, and even legal defense.
The Wikimedia Foundation runs a massive global operation on the back of small, individual donations to stay independent and ad-free. Mastodon is hoping to prove that this same model can sustain a decentralized social network, keeping its loyalty with its users instead of shareholders.
