Mastodon, an open-source social media platform, launched an in-app donation campaign on its Android and iOS applications to secure funding.
The campaign initially targets users on Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online, servers operated by the non-profit. Donation banners, dismissible by users, will appear for accounts active for at least four weeks. The organization stated it would not persistently prompt users for donations.
Such fundraising efforts have proven effective for other non-profit organizations. The Wikimedia Foundation, for instance, obtains most of its funding from individual donors, including through pop-up banners on Wikipedia. Mastodon’s user base, however, is smaller, with 8.1 million registered accounts and under 1 million monthly active users. This in-app feature aims to streamline the donation process for users.
Mastodon plans to extend this campaign to its web platform and, if successful, make it available to all Mastodon instances. This expansion could allow individual server administrators to receive direct financial support from their users, potentially aiding in operational sustainability.
As a decentralized social media platform, Mastodon faces financial support challenges. Unlike advertising-supported platforms such as Meta and X, Mastodon has historically relied on user donations via Patreon and contributions from open-source focused funds and foundations.
In 2023, Mastodon raised €545,000 in total donations, marking a 65% year-over-year increase. However, its Patreon donor base decreased by almost 23% to 7,400 during the same period. A Mastodon blog post acknowledged the complexities of fundraising, stating, “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.”
