With the decline of the website FKA Twitter, there’s been a rise in federated social platforms. In short, the idea of these platforms is that you can follow people from different sites and have one place you see your content. E.g. follow your facebook friends on Twitter, see Instagram reels in your TikTok, etc. A follow up idea is that there are networks like Mastodon / BlueSky, platforms that are free / open source, and allow anyone to run servers that host smaller micro communities. If you open Mastodon, you’ll notice that while most people have a username that ends in @mastodon.social, some have others! Mine is @evanhirsh@hachyderm.io, a mastodon instance focused more on Software Engineering. Hachyderm is a free instance of Mastodon, and makes all its money off donations. This is great when it works, but it doesn’t always work.

Social networks are already an unprofitable business within the framework of capitalism. You have to host text, photos, and videos in perpetuity for all your users. Even if I had a Mastodon instance with 2000 weekly active users and froze sign ups, my costs will grow every single month even with S3 object storage if my users do not turn on auto delete. This is not sustainable for small donation only instances. This year already we’ve seen the closure of many instances (mastodon.au, mozilla.social, botsin.space) and spinoff anticapitalist networks (Cohost) due to a lack of funding, in both the literal and non literal sense of the word. Over in Bluesky world, we have its benefactor / cofounder Jack Dorsey leaving the board, leaving them to scramble to raise funding from Blockchain Capital. If this continues, this fledgeling idea of “federated social networks” risks dying out to an open protocol that is functionally owned and maintained by a few large parties which seek to benefit from the veneer of portability / openness.

So, i’m gonna say something rash. If you clicked onto this post from Mastodon or even Bluesky, please brace yourself for a second because this might make you angry, but please please give me a chance to explain myself here.

I think Mastodon (and Bluesky) need to implement some form of advertising (and subscriptions) as a revenue path. Let me clarify.

Donations are not enough. All users, active or not, cost each Mastodon instance dollars a month to host. If you are not giving every instance you have content on 5 bucks a year at minimum, you are not covering your hosting costs, plain and simple. To fix this, Mastodon explicitly needs to implement into the project itself systems that allow admins to monetize their instance. Here are two of the ideas I had for how these networks should implement funding in a way that is both ethical and respects their users.

Plug and Play Ads

Assume I am a Mastodon admin. Most of my users are free, and they do not pay for donations. One option that can exist is for me to turn on advertising posts on my instance. By default, there would be a network provided by the Mastodon project with all the advertisers which wish to sell ads on Mastodon. These ads would be across all instances in the network, and not target explicit groups by using information such as age or location. If I don’t like the default Mastodon ad network, I could plug in a different one that has a different revenue split or advertisers. If my users get annoyed with the frequency, I could change it to be 1 ad every 20 posts or so, which gets me less money but makes them happier. So then why would any user stay on my instance? They could go to another one without ads, etc. Well you’ve read this post long enough so I assume you aren’t just going to go back and yell at me online in bad faith, so here’s the kicker! Users can just turn the ads off. Third and first party clients both will have this option! Users that don’t want ads are going to block them anyways, so being advertised to is explicitly a way for users who for whatever reason won’t or can’t donate to ensure their favorite place stays alive. If you turn that off, and you aren’t giving money, you’re just sort of an asshole moocher! That’s fine if you want to be, but that’s your choice. Admins could also

Just have users pay for things

One of the ways to solve the growing data under 2000 user’s problem I talked about is sort of how Slack does it, which is to just delete posts after a few months by default. A way that Mastodon instances can help keep costs under control, is to make it so that if you want to keep your older posts, you need to pay like a buck or two a month. Many users prefer having their posts stay ephemeral anyways, and it’s not like they are portable across instances themselves. I see this as a pretty reasonable way to force users to help out with the costs of hosting these things. A cool other option might be to literally offload the server cost to the users. Built in cost calculation based on storage space and API usage that just gets billed to the user is pretty transparent, and probably the most ethical / non profit way this could be run. If a server enables both this and ads, you could have it auto shut the ads off when someone is paying! There could be a bar visible in the UX and the API’s that show how much funding your server has, kind of how Wikipedia works, and even donations could give little perks such as a special donor badge or something (similar to how Signal works!).

If you read this far you either agree with me or are angrier than anyone else has ever been. I respect it either way. The thing is, I just want this project to be successful, and every single time I see an instance close down I get a sinking feeling that this project is just not working. I have wanted to start my own instances multiple times, whether it was for esports, software, or Seattle, and the entire time the cost of maintenance / upkeep was the thing preventing me from doing so. The way things are going, if we don’t turn around soon and prioritize this as an issue, we’re going to lose even more servers, communities, and importantly, posts (since they are not portable on Mastodon). I want Bluesky to gain funding from normally without having to resort to further funding rounds from VC’s that make everyone freak out each time, given its impossible to do so otherwise without “AI” in your name these days. Importantly, i’d rather these platforms be funded ethically with systems similar to the ones I proposed rather than fully die out and be replaced with the social networks of old again. There’s a chance here to change things for the better, away from the way things used to be. If we ignore this entirely because of a bunch of screaming people that pirate indie games, then we’re gonna be back in the world of data collection nightmares.