Mastodon adds email newsletters, making creator subscriptions easier

Mastodon is betting that the simplest subscription tool on the internet can solve one of the fediverse’s hardest problems: how to help people find creators without forcing them into another platform. With Mastodon 4.6, account owners can let anonymous visitors subscribe to posts by email, opening a path for newsletters that does not require a Mastodon account at all.

The move turns email into a distribution bridge for the open social web. Mastodon said the feature was hidden behind a feature flag during development and was not ready for testing as of March 2026, underscoring that the product was still being tuned before launch. The project said the work was funded by an NGI0 grant through NLNet, part of a broader push to make Mastodon more usable for institutions, journalists, bloggers, and other publishers that need durable audience channels outside Big Tech ecosystems.

Mastodon also made clear that email newsletters would not be turned on by default everywhere. The project said server administrators can decide whether to enable them because newsletters can significantly increase operating costs, a practical reminder that federation is not just a product question but an infrastructure one. That same logic shows up in Mastodon’s roadmap, where version 4.6 includes institution support, giving organizations more control over landing pages and letting visitors sign up for updates with an email account.

The newsletter feature is arriving alongside Collections, which Mastodon says is the biggest new addition in 4.6. Collections are curated lists of accounts meant to help new and existing users discover the fediverse. Profiles can opt in or out of discovery, each collection can hold up to 25 profiles, and Mastodon excluded a follow-all shortcut to limit spam risk. In April 2026, Mastodon said Collections had been enabled on mastodon.social for user feedback, after the project said in March it had merged 347 pull requests from 13 contributors.

The launch extends a longer effort to make writers and publishers visible across the fediverse. In 2024, Mastodon introduced fediverse:creator, which lets link previews surface an author’s fediverse account, and some of the first sites to adopt it were The Verge, MacStories, and MacRumors. The strategy is now more ambitious: use email to bring readers in, use Collections to help them discover accounts, and use institutional controls to make the system practical for organizations that want reach without surrendering ownership.

The timing matters. Mastodon’s statistics API showed 10,071,461 registered accounts and 749,065 active users on May 16, 2026, while broader reporting around June put the fediverse at roughly 735,000 monthly active users and more than a million active accounts. Mastodon’s 2024 annual report said the project generated €2.2 million in revenue and grew to more than six full-time employees, signaling that the company sees sustainable funding and institutional adoption as part of the same growth path.