Mastodon, a decentralised social network, is exploring newsletter functionality to attract writers and readers who currently use platforms like Substack and Ghost.

Newsletters work differently from regular social media feeds. Instead of competing for attention in a timeline, newsletters arrive directly in your email inbox—you have to opt in to receive them. This format has proven stickier for readers. For Mastodon, which has historically attracted mostly tech-savvy early adopters, adding newsletters could help it reach creators and audiences it hasn't yet.

Mastodon is not like Twitter or Facebook. It's built on a decentralised model: instead of one company running everything, many independent servers (called instances) work together using a common protocol called ActivityPub. This is a bit like email—you can have a Gmail account or an Outlook account, but they can all send messages to each other.

Here's where newsletters get tricky. On Substack or Ghost, the company handles everything: one database, one system, one delivery mechanism. On Mastodon's decentralised network, a creator might post from one server while their readers are spread across hundreds of others. Making sure newsletters arrive reliably at all those readers, handling bounces, and managing who unsubscribes—all of that has to work smoothly across servers that don't all operate identically. ActivityPub was designed for short posts, not for the ordered, guaranteed delivery that newsletters require.

A company called Ghost has already solved this problem by building ActivityPub support into its own platform, positioning itself as a bridge between independent creators and the open internet. Mastodon moving toward newsletters is essentially approaching from the opposite direction.

Mastodon's user base has moved up and down sharply. It grew when Twitter had problems in late 2022, and again after X made unpopular changes, but users have drifted away to other platforms like Bluesky or left entirely. Newsletters could help attract and keep creators with audiences, but that alone won't solve Mastodon's bigger problem: most people don't stay because the platform feels empty when they first join, mobile apps don't work well, and there's no good way to discover new content without an algorithm recommending posts.

That said, there is good logic here. If Mastodon becomes the place where independent writers build audiences they actually own—not owned by any corporation—it stops being just another social app. It becomes infrastructure. That's a stronger, more lasting position, and it matches what Mastodon's creators have always wanted to build.

Mastodon's development team is quite small compared to the platforms it's trying to compete with. How well they execute the newsletter feature matters a lot. A half-finished newsletter feature that works differently on different servers would damage user trust more than not shipping it at all.

Whether creators actually move to Mastodon for newsletters depends on details we don't yet know. The direction, though, makes sense.