Service offerings from Mastodon
Hosting and support for institutions
The Mastodon Team
Building a better social web
In a recent post, we shared that one of our priorities for 2025 is to establish a more sustainable financial base for the Mastodon organisation.
In 2024, Mastodon gGmbH took over hosting of the European Commission’s Mastodon service. We also signed a support contract with the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. More recently, we started working with the city of Blois, in France. While all of these are public institutions, we’re also very proud having added AltStore as a customer in the last few weeks.
At the time, each of these were one-off opportunities. They also added some much-needed predictable elements to our income.
Continuing towards our goal of financial sustainability, we’re now ready to expand on the success of providing these services to organisations. Institutions with an interest in operating their own Mastodon servers can contact us via the new page on our website, to discuss options. This could be a fully operated server under the organisation’s own domain run by our team (with moderation included, on request); or, we can work with an organisation’s in-house operations team, via a support contract.
We’re taking this step of offering paid hosting, moderation, and support for larger organisations to establish a reliable recurring revenue stream. It is vital that we broaden our income - but, our aspiration remains that Mastodon should be predominantly funded through community contributions in the future.
It is also fundamental that Mastodon as a network must not be centrally hosted or managed. The Fediverse is decentralised, by design. This makes it resilient to change, and it means that people have a free choice to join communities that match their interests, needs, and cultural expectations. To be clear, we’re extremely grateful to everyone that runs a Mastodon server as part of the network, including all the companies that manage Mastodon services for groups, communities, organisations, and individuals. Your support is invaluable.
These new commercial offerings will not be a singular focus for Mastodon. We’ll continue to build the software, alongside operating our own server that can act as an entry point to the Mastodon community for anyone who wants to join. We want to work together with everyone in the ecosystem, in order to ensure that a range of Mastodon servers support the community, and that the Fediverse as a whole remains diverse, free and open to all.