Sub.club aims to fund the fediverse via premium feeds

A new service from the makers of the Mammoth app for Mastodon intends to bring the creator economy to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. Sub.club, launching on Thursday, will allow creators on Mastodon — a decentralized Twitter/X rival — to offer paid subscriptions and content by way of premium feeds. In addition to supporting creators, sub.club thinks premium feeds could also serve other use cases, like supporting helpful bots or generating funds to help maintain a community’s Mastodon server, for instance.

The latter would be particularly useful as the fediverse today is made up of independent servers that interconnect with one another to form a decentralized open social web that includes Mastodon and other services. Those servers tend to be community-supported, which can be a challenge when it comes to raising funds.

Developed over the past few months, sub.club shares engineering and design resources with Mammoth, the Mastodon app backed by Mozilla, Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff. Though some fediverse supporters don’t like the idea of VCs and for-profit businesses entering their space, Mammoth’s co-founder Bart Decrem thinks bringing money into the fediverse could help it to thrive.

While he admits there will be some pushback at the idea, Decrem says that Mastodon and ActivityPub, the protocol powering the fediverse, could use more resources.

“I think it’s important, for the ecosystem to thrive, that there be a way to have premium content to build businesses here,” he said. “That’s a fundamental belief.”

To use sub.club, Mastodon users can set up their own premium feed at whatever price they choose, which others can subscribe to via the web. Designed to run on the ActivityPub platform, sub.club creates a feed that can be consumed from within any Mastodon client on the web. It’s also offering an API to allow Mastodon app developers to natively integrate these feeds into their own mobile and desktop apps. Third-party developer Thomas Ricouard, who makes the Ice Cubes Mastodon app for iOS and Mac, will be the first to implement the subscription feeds.

“I’m very happy that I can help with the creator economy over the Mastodon and the fediverse by expanding Ice Cubes features,” Ricouard told TechCrunch. “And we believe sub.club will help fund various creators and services over the fediverse, as it’s much needed.”

Sub.club will also roll out to Mammoth’s app starting on Friday, allowing users to click a button to subscribe to creators’ paid feeds.

When users click to follow a subscription-based feed, they’ll receive a direct message that links them to a payment page on the web. The payments are currently powered by Stripe, but over time, sub.club may add support for other payment providers.

To generate revenue for itself, sub.club takes a 6% cut of the transactions — that’s less than the 8% or 12% Patreon takes on subscriptions via its Pro and Premium plans, respectively.

Decrem says sub.club differs from Patreon in other ways, too, as it’s “more of a back-end service” than Patreon, as opposed to being a destination where content can be discovered.

(Still, it’s worth noting that Apple is currently forcing Patreon to use its in-app purchase system or risk being removed from the App Store. Sub.club, for now at least, may fly under the radar.)

The potential for sub.club could grow alongside the open social web. When Meta’s Threads fully integrates with ActivityPub, it would bring a new class of creators into the fediverse, and they may be looking for alternative means of monetization beyond advertising, which the fediverse generally avoids. (Threads, however, may not).

That’s a potentially monetizable activity, Decrem thinks, which is why Mammoth and sub.club’s parent company, The Blvd. Inc., is seeking to raise a seed round.

“If people start building little apps, you’ll start seeing entrepreneurial activity and money flowing through the system. And I think that’s exciting to a class of investors,” Decrem said.

Under Elon Musk, X (formerly Twitter) has sought to raise creator profiles allowing them to generate revenue from their posts and videos. But it has struggled to keep advertisers amid the controversial and toxic content that’s often shared on the network. As a result, the company is incentivizing posts that generate a lot of replies, as these can qualify for revenue-sharing, which is leading to more clickbait across the platform and diluting the more valuable pockets of conversation.

Mastodon, meanwhile, is largely untouched by any push to monetize its posts, supporting itself instead through Patreon, grants and more recently, merchandise.

Whether the fediverse will actually welcome paid content remains to be seen.

Sub.club — not to be confused with Sub Club from RevenueCat — is initially available as a developer preview and will later this fall roll out tools that will allow Mastodon server owners the ability to support their instance financially. For that product, sub.club will waive its fees and its Stripe fees for the first 90 days.

Early adopters of the premium feeds include the premium bot “Pups Where They Don’t Belong” and an account from developer and sub.club adviser Anuj Ahooja.