Tried building on Mastodon, wasn't financially viable. There's extremely little will to pay people for work in the fediverse, and Mastodon couldn't even give credit to contributors to help them raise their own profile. The only Fediverse orgs that have paid me are IFTAS and Nivenly.
Pedro Vezza
Why did you decide to bet on atproto over Mastodon or similar?
Feb 27, 2026 at 1:24 AM
Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse
In a wide-ranging interview with Eugen Rochko, creator of the decentralized social network Mastodon, Rochko shared why Threads federation fell flat, why ActivityPub and ATProto will likely never merge, and what it will take to grow the fediverse.
Are there any other guides to Mastodon and the Fediverse?
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse
The many branches of the Fediverse
As more and more people are asking me about Mastodon I felt a need for a picture to point at, showcasing how the software known as Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse. I made this infographic to help myself and others explain the many different use-
maegul (@maegul@hachyderm.io)
I think the #Ghost and #Wordpress federations pose interesting questions about what #fediverse platforms can and should be. Do we actually want blogs and feeds of blogs folded into a mastodon/microblog social feed? Do we want to read and comment on blogs on mastodon? Do we want all the diversity of the fediverse fed into a single platform's UI and hope that it works well? Are we worried that some choices by our platform or instance admin might hinder this process? I'm rather skeptical. 1/
Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)
Two pieces of good news for W Social: 1) I may have found the problem that has bricked their network for the past week. 2) This may very well be the LAST article I ever write about them. It's exhausting and stressful and I want to retire from this beat and go back to promoting the Fediverse. Thank you all for your support and encouragement. And to my trusted source (a Fedi friend) who found and shared with me brilliant gems: THANK YOU! It's been a real honor collaborating with you ❤️
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to. | Seldo.com
Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.
Mastodon is for the people
How we're thinking about supporting the communities that rely on Mastodon every day.
The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization
Sure, we have open source, federated replacements for Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube. How do we get creators to use this stuff? One consideration involves the ability to pay for things.
Any big Fediverse users around? In github.com/singi-labs/sifa-workspace/iss… we are exploring how to integrate your Fediverse activity into Sifa and what that could/should look like. If you have any ideas/suggestions/opinions about this, we'd love to hear about them before building.
RSS/Fediverse feed ingestion for ATmosphere Stream · Issue #111 · singi-labs/sifa-workspace
github.comSo uh, apparently $288/year is not enough to run a Mastodon service for ~3 users, and this is a known issue (masto.host/mastodon-content-retention-se…) with no solution (github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions…!
Please welcome @railway.com as the newest member of @opensourcepledge.com 🎉 They rely on OSS projects like @vite.dev, @tanstack.com, @drizzle.team and @tailwindcss.com, and they're doing their part to sustain the ecosystem, from which we all benefit. Read all about it:
Railway Runs Open Source, Now We're Funding It
blog.railway.com
