Club membership

This is an experiment. Please ignore that the site is a bit ugly, we’re looking at the actual text in this second iteration. Questions and feedback are welcome, just speak with me @JohanEmpa.

The idea

I‘m searching for a way to make Mastodon.green economically sustainable. Somehow this server must cover its costs to survive in the long run.

At the moment I can see three options:

  1. Donations: Mastodon.green stays free and I launch a page accepting donations
  2. Freemium: The main server stays free and club membership is required to get access to extra features such as a second members-only club server, Discord server and/or a federated chat server
  3. Membership: Club membership required for everyone after a 30-day free trial

The current experiment

Freemium: It’s free to use the main mastodon.green server, but club members get extra benefits.

Why choose Mastodon.green?

In exchange for a subscription fee you get:

✨ A climate friendly alternative to Meta and Twitter

💚 How we’re different to big-tech apps

✔️ No surveillance capitalism

✔️ No algorithm

✔️ No ads

💚 We’re part of the Fediverse

🔸 Federated

🔸 Open source

🔸 Move between Mastodon servers as you wish

🔸 It’s possible to self-host a server

💚 Climate action

🔸 Powered by 100 % renewable energy*

🔸 Beyond net-zero to climate-positive (ambition)**

🔸 5 % of gross revenue goes to CO2 removal

🔸 50 % of revenue from the Pioneer tier goes towards CO2 removal

💚 European community

🔸 A welcoming community

🔸Hosted by Albin Social, a one person company based in Germany

🔸 European privacy standards

🔸 A community timeline without bots and companies. That said, if you want to follow bots and companies you can do so, they are welcome as long as they post in unlisted mode.

* The type of energy used by our cloud provider for file storage is currently unknown

** Scope 1-3 emissions needs to be calculated. We‘re not worse than other Mastodon servers, but we have some work to do before we can accurately report and remove our unavoidable emissions. I will need some assistance by people who know how to calculate scope 1-3 emissions.

Join the club via Patreon or Steady

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AlbinSocial

Steady: https://steadyhq.com/albinsocial

Steady is the German equivalent to Patreon. Yes they have a hq in their domain name but not in their brand name.

Membership levels

Screenshot of membership levels on Patreon

1. Social

Thank you for helping us crowd-fund a sustainable Mastodon server.

You get:

  • Access to mastodon.green
  • Social club membership
  • A vote for a supported language

2. Pioneer

Everything in Social, plus:

  • A page
  • A highlighted link to that page
  • Extra CO2 removal

You’re pioneering CO2 removal on the Fediverse. With your help Mastodon.green can go beyond net-zero to remove CO2 from from the atmosphere. We’re so happy that you’re with us on this journey.

Who can become a club member?

You must live in an EU country to become a club member. It‘s too much for me as a one person company to serve the whole world.

Why membership and not donations?

When I look at other servers I see how the number of free users increase faster than the number of donations. It means that the costs increase faster than the income. To be sustainable both cost and income must increase at the same rate.

Why not free?

I need to pay the cost of the server, the wage to any paid moderators and the costs of any freelancers plus my own salary.

Why does everything has to be subscriptions these days?

A one time donation typically isn’t enough to cover the real cost of social media.

Supported languages

For cost reasons our servers only allow supported languages. A language need moderators who can read reports in that language and occasionally look at the timelines to see if anything is de-railing. Machine translation doesn’t work well in the latter situation, particularly not when text is written on images.

The Mastodon software can handle 187 languages. Any of those languages can become a supported language. A language need 200 votes to become supported.

Supported platforms

The fediverse has different platforms, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma, Misskey, Friendica, Peertube and so on. Some of these platforms requires more resources in the form of moderation time. In short, some of the have lots of content that violates our rules.

We want to federate with as many as possible, but for the time being we‘re limiting it to Mastodon and Pixelfed. Every platform adds complexity and cost in the form of time and money. We can treat additional platforms in the same way as we treat additional languages. Club members can cast a vote for a platform they want us to federate with and we start doing so when some threshold has been reached.

If we can break even and get a sustainable small company going with some part time moderators, then it‘s probably possible to widen our federation to more platforms.

@JohanEmpa@mastodon.green