Sub.club is here to help the fediverse make money

The fediverse has the potential to help create enduring and interoperable social networks. But many creators and businesses rely on bigger, closed platforms because they offer direct ways to make money from their audiences, which is hard to do in the fediverse right now.

Sub.club is trying to solve that. 

The idea is that this will let users on ActivityPub-based platforms like Mastodon easily offer paid subscriptions and premium content while taking a 6 percent cut in addition to payment processing fees. It could solve a big problem with the fediverse right now: it’s not easy to make a living on it unless you direct your followers back to existing platforms like Patreon that are closed off and require users to visit a particular site or app to get much of the content.

Bringing money into the fediverse ecosystem and having a way for creators to get paid could be an important building block, Bart Decrem, one of the founders of sub.club, tells The Verge. “So we think this work is super important for all of us that believe in the promise of the internet.”

That could be especially true if the fediverse is successful to the point where it creates what sub.club adviser Anuj Ahooja calls “one last network effect.” That would be the idea of everyone joining fediverse platforms built on an open protocol where it’s possible to interact online with the option to move from network to network and platform to platform at will. “From there, you can drive so much innovation around social media,” Ahooja says.

While X is still culturally relevant enough that it was the first place where Joe Biden’s campaign posted the news that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, many people got the news on other platforms as it splashed across Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and Whatsapp. I’m not sure everyone is going to coalesce in one place or that they even want to, and profiles you can take with you could be a part of that.

Currently, sub.club is only available for Mastodon users, and depending on how you use Mastodon, you might run into the service in different ways. On Mastodon web clients, creators can point people to a subscription page.

In clients that include a rich experience for the subscriptions — right now, that’s Mammoth, which is made by the same developer team, and Ice Cubes — creators can add a subscribe button that appears at the top of their profile that takes users to a subscription webpage.

As a creator, making the post your subscribers will see takes an extra step: you have to DM your sub.club account. Then, people who subscribe to your posts will see that post in their following feeds.

Sub.club doesn’t just want to push creators to only use its services; instead, the team envisions building “a subscribe button that integrates with other paid subscription products,” Ahooja says. That’s why it’s launching as a developer preview; “if you’re going to build something, build it in a way that’s standard and portable across multiple services,” according to Ahooja.

It’s also created an API that can build premium bots, according to this FAQ, so you could, for example, set up a silly bot that adds animals to photos.

Sometime this fall, sub.club also plans to let Mastodon server admins use the tool to help fund maintenance instead of asking users for support through platforms like Patreon or Ko-Fi.

“There’s a lot of free labor that runs the fediverse right now,” Ahooja says. “So let’s make sure people are getting compensated.”