Mastodon looks to newsletters to help revive the open social web
Mastodon’s newly launched newsletter feature lets anyone subscribe to creators by email, even without a Mastodon account.
Mastodon , the open, decentralized alternative to Big Tech apps like X and Threads, is betting that email could help solve the open social web’s biggest problem: audience growth.
The feature is arriving as part of Mastodon 4.6 , a broader update that introduced other changes, like refreshed user profiles and support for “Collections”, Mastodon’s take on the user-generated suggested follow lists popularized elsewhere on the social web as “Starter Packs.”
Instead, users can simply enter their email address to start getting updates from the creator. Mastodon’s default post character limit is 500 characters. However, individual server administrators can modify this limit, which means some servers could be set up specifically for the distribution of longer posts.
Because Mastodon accounts are portable, creators could still take their audience with them if they ever wanted to move to a new server.
The company explains in a blog post that the new feature, for now, is intended more for its institutional users, referencing its recent move to offer hosting and moderation services to organizations and entities that want to run their own servers.
If adopted, email support could allow Mastodon to grow its footprint beyond the 735,000 monthly active users it sees today, down from a peak of over 2 million just a few years ago. The wider open social web, known as the fediverse, has over a million active accounts .
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