Consumer passion in open-source, decentralized social media isn’t one thing that was actually just demonstrated in updates titles over recent year, it’s likewise noticeable in the financials responsible for Mastodon. The charitable company energies some of the numerous applications that entered fashion trend as a Twitter option complying with Elon Odor’s achievement of the social media he’s given that relabelled X. Depending on to Mastodn’s yearly file, discharged today, the business states it’s viewed a 488% rise in gifts, totting €325.9K, or even approximately $341,985 in U.S. bucks.
That’s up coming from merely €55.6K in its own 2021, though still a considerably smaller sized volume compared to the funds putting in to various other prospective Twitter competitors like Bluesky, Stone, or even Spill. Bluesky, as an example, introduced a seed sphere of $8 thousand this June, while Stone (previously T2) reared over a thousand coming from angel capitalists, as well as Spill reared a $2.75 thousand pre-seed sphere.
But unlike investor-backed startups, Mastodon operates as a non-profit supported by user donations, primarily from Patreon. That supporter base also grew last year to 9,603, up 1,614% from the 560 donors it had at year-end 2021. From its own custom sponsorship portal, it also has an additional 53 subscriptions, up from 20 last year.
What’s telling is that the biggest jumps in Mastodon support came immediately following Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, which closed in October.
As Mastodon’s report notes, the number of donors on Patreon grew from 1,428 in September to 7,962 in October — that’s a 6x increase. And the number of donors via Stripe increased from 19 to 44. However this, in turn, meant the average annual donation decreased to roughly $35.70 USD, due to an increase in the number of donors who contributed smaller amounts.
The funds were used to support the operating costs of running Mastodon (€127.1K / $133.5K USD), personnel expenses (€79.7K / $83.7K USD), and other miscellaneous expenses (€6.4K / $6.72K USD), the report says.
In addition, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko benefitted from an open-source fund financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the German Open Knowledge Foundation, which contributed €18.6K ($19.5K USD). NLnet, a non-profit foundation that supports open-source development of internet technologies, also contributed €42.8K ($44.95K USD).
The full report also goes into detail about Mastodon’s development over the course of the year, which included a branding update with more vibrant shades of purple, and other web and mobile software updates, redesigns, improvements to its moderation system and support, and more.
Over the course of 2022, the two servers Mastodon itself functions — Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online — gained 486K new users and processed 15,237 moderation reports. 5,920 of those resulted in the suspension of an account. And, in total, 66,637 accounts were suspended this past year.
Given Mastodon’s growth, the company aims to set up a U.S. non-profit branch (501(c)(3)) this year with a board of governors so it can become eligible for larger grants from U.S.-based donors and allow donors to make their donations tax-deductible.
It’s also planning further merchandise efforts, which began with the sales of stickers, tees, mugs, and pins earlier this year. The report didn’t break out how much revenue those merch sales produced, however.
In addition, the company will continue to work to make Mastodon more user-friendly, the report says. The company recently made good on those efforts with the release of version 4.2 which was a significant update designed to make the service easier to use — particularly for newcomers.
Mastodon also plans to improve moderation tooling for server operators to address spam and abuse issues. That issue had come to light this year, as well, as Mastodon’s software — which anyone can run on their own servers — was found to be hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In one case, the server operator explained that they could only manage moderation in their spare time — and they were only one person, not a team as you’d have at Meta — so removals could take days.
As for Mastodon’s growth — which speaks to its potential impact on X as former users flee the platform looking for alternatives — the network grew from 2,527 servers, totaling 2.7M registered and 294K monthly active users at the end of 2021 to 9,686 servers, totaling 5.8M registered users and 1.8M monthly active users.
On its own two servers, Mastodon had 117K active accounts through year-end, representing a roughly 37% retention rate.
Of course, as we’ve seen, Mastodon’s consumer metrics wax and wane at times with Musk’s pronouncements about new X policies and changes. For example, TechCrunch noted that as X underwent its rebranding, Mastodon’s monthly active users had reached 2.1 million, only slightly short of in 2013’s peak of 2.5 million when Odor bought the social network. Currently, the network reports 1.7 million monthly active consumers.
