sub.club

» see sub.club as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A hundred and nine days separate sub.club's launch from its closing note. It opened on 29 August 2024 with a sensible premise: the fediverse had spent two years absorbing people leaving Twitter, a good number of those people wrote for a living, and there was no way on Mastodon to charge anybody for anything. sub.club added one. A creator could put some posts behind a subscription, readers paid monthly, and the whole thing stayed inside the follower's normal timeline instead of exiling them to another app.

The people who built it were not new at this. The BLVD is Bart Decrem's studio, and Decrem co-founded Flock, the social browser released in October 2005 that put your contacts and feeds into the chrome of the browser itself. He went from there to Tapulous, whose Tap Tap Revenge was an early iPhone hit and was sold to Disney in 2010. The record contains both patient open-web work and a real exit. If anyone was equipped to make the fediverse pay a writer, it was reasonable to think it was this team.

On 16 December the account posted that it was over. Decrem's statement was plain about the cause: they had not reached sufficient traction or adoption quickly enough, and had not attracted the investors or partnerships that buy a company more time. Creators already owed money would be paid in full. The service would keep working until the end of January 2025, and then it would not.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ six percent ~

The cut was six percent plus payment processing, which is a notably decent number. Patreon takes between eight and twelve, Substack takes ten. Undercutting both was presumably the point, and it is also most of the problem: six percent of the subscription revenue of a hundred and fifty fediverse creators is not a company, it is a hobby with a Stripe account. Decrem said the traction had not arrived fast enough. At six percent of that base, the traction needed to arrive very fast indeed.

I was never anywhere near the audience for this. My habits were set on MSN and on Turkish forums where nobody charged anybody for anything, and in 2024 I had no Mastodon account and nothing to put behind a paywall. It earns a page here for the pattern rather than the product: somebody finally built the missing piece the fediverse had spent years complaining about, and a complaint turned out to be a different thing from a market.

~ what went with it ~

sub.club did not fall alone. The same announcement wound down Mammoth, the studio's well-reviewed Mastodon client, and moth.social, the server it ran. One funding decision closed a payments layer, an app and an instance that people's accounts lived on, which is a reminder of how much of the decentralized web is actually sitting on one small company's balance sheet.

An adviser on the project, Anuj Ahooja, offered the consoling reading at the time: something like this will come back once the open ecosystem is big enough to carry it, probably built into the protocol rather than sold on top of it. Possibly so. In the meantime sub.club has no DNS record, and the hundred and fifty people who signed up went back to posting for free.

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