Open source X rival Mastodon begins raising funds with new in-app donation feature

Open source X and Threads competitor Mastodon will begin experimenting with a new way to raise funds: in-app donations. The organization on Wednesday announced it’s launching a campaign that introduces banners inside its Android and iOS apps, prompting users to make a monetary donation.

Initially, the feature will be shown only to those on the Mastodon servers the nonprofit itself operates, Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online. These banners will be easy to dismiss, Mastodon says, and will only be shown to people who have accounts that have existed for at least four weeks. The organization promises that it won’t continually prompt users to donate, either.

Such campaigns can work well for nonprofit organizations at scale. Wikimedia Foundation, for example, brings in the majority of its funding from individual donors, including those who donate through the pop-up banners that occasionally appear on Wikipedia. However, Mastodon has a much smaller user base: 8.1 million registered accounts, and fewer than 1 million monthly active users. Still, the banners could encourage people who haven’t actively sought out ways to contribute to now do so, as it makes the process more seamless as an in-app feature.

Mastodon says it will later expand the campaign to the web and, if successful, make it available to all other Mastodon instances. The latter would allow individual server admins to receive direct support from their own users, which could help keep them operational.

As an open, decentralized social media platform, Mastodon faces challenges when it comes to financial support. Unlike Meta and X, which are supported by ads, Mastodon so far has relied largely on user donations from Patreon. It has also accepted a handful of donations from open source-focused funds and foundations over the years.

In 2023, Mastodon raised €545,000 in total donations, up 65% year-over-year, but its Patreon donor base dropped nearly 23% to 7,400. (Its 2024 report is not out yet.) That decline could have pushed it to look into more aggressive fundraising tactics, especially as competition from Meta and newcomers like the VC-backed startup Bluesky is growing.

“We know that collecting money can present complexities and questions,” a Mastodon blog post stated. “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.”

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