Mastodon, an open-source competitor to platforms like X and Threads, is initiating a new fundraising strategy by introducing in-app donation banners. This campaign, announced on Wednesday, will appear within its Android and iOS applications, prompting users to contribute financially.
Initially, these donation prompts will be limited to users on the Mastodon servers directly operated by the nonprofit: Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online. The organization emphasizes that these banners will be easily dismissible and will only be displayed to accounts that have been active for a minimum of four weeks. Mastodon has also committed to avoiding continuous donation requests to users.
This approach to fundraising is common among large nonprofit organizations, such as the Wikimedia Foundation, which largely relies on individual donations, often collected through similar pop-up banners on Wikipedia. Despite Mastodon’s significantly smaller user base, which includes 8.1 million registered accounts and fewer than 1 million monthly active users, the integration of in-app donation features is expected to streamline the contribution process and potentially encourage new donors.
Should this initial phase prove successful, Mastodon plans to expand the campaign to its web platform. Furthermore, the organization intends to make this fundraising tool available to all other Mastodon instances, which would enable individual server administrators to gain direct financial support from their user bases, aiding in their operational sustainability.
As a decentralized and open social media platform, Mastodon faces unique financial challenges. Unlike advertising-supported platforms such as Meta and X, Mastodon has historically relied predominantly on user donations through Patreon, supplemented by contributions from open-source focused funds and foundations.
In 2023, Mastodon reported a total of €545,000 in donations, marking a 65% year-over-year increase. However, its Patreon donor base experienced a nearly 23% decline, falling to 7,400. This decrease in Patreon support, coupled with increasing competition from platforms like Meta and emerging venture capital-backed startups such as Bluesky, may have prompted Mastodon to explore more proactive fundraising methods.
A Mastodon blog post addressed the new initiative, stating, “We know that collecting money can present complexities and questions. We’d like to figure out how to do this well, together with the community. This is not a corporate fundraising campaign: it’s an effort to secure the future of a more ethical and independent social web.”
