Mastodon founder wants to make money by offering hosting

The founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko, wants to talk to investors in the coming weeks about the possibility of charging money for offering hosting packages with Mastodon. Mastodon currently has no revenue model.

The intention is that the service will remain free for users and for hosters who arrange their own hosting, but that there will be a subscription for hosting your own Mastodon server via Mastodon GmbH itself. Rochko tells Techcrunch. In doing so, the founder wants to emulate Mozilla, the company that offers Firefox for free and open source and wants to make money from extra services such as a VPN subscription.

There are currently hosting parties that offer hosting in combination with a Mastodon instance, and they are on the Mastodon site. Many of these currently have no place. Rochko, who is currently the only employee of Mastodon GmbH, says he will talk to investors about the plans in the coming weeks.

Rochko has no plans for advertising on Mastodon. The service currently has 2.5 million monthly active users on a total of 8,600 servers. The largest server belongs to Rochko itself, but Mastodon.social currently does not allow the creation of new accounts. Scaling the server would take too much time, the founder says.

Rochko’s only source of income is a Patreon account, which brings in $31,000 a month, much more than the $7,000 of some time ago. Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has become more popular this year since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter came to light. Mastodon works based on ActivityPub.