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.
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.