Monetization Options for Mastodon Servers

10 days ago, I created a Reddit post to ask about this as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/yw9tyi/paidfor_ma...

Through that, I got some links to services of interest that are membership-based:

https://communick.com/

A paid membership with Communick brings access to a bunch of services they provide.

https://wiki.social.coop/home.html

An optional paid membership with Social Cooperative makes one a stakeholder in their governance process.

https://mastodon.green/about

Paid membership with Mastodon Green, in addition to access to the Mastodon instance, goes towards green hosting.

Subscriptions are fine, but it can be hard to get new users without a free tier or free period where they can try it out and see what the value to them would be. And then you don't want the free part to be too good so that people never upgrade, or you have to police people who make a new email address every month to get another free trial.

Advertising is like poison in the wider fediverse right now... which IMO means there is a big opportunity for an advertising-based server. Just be prepared for some of the larger peers to block you, so you have to make sure there is enough value on your local instance to draw a crowd.