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.
