Mastodon creator Eugen Roszko is stepping down as CEO of the open source decentralized social network and X rival as part of the organization’s transition to a nonprofit structure announced earlier this year. This change is Mastodon’s most significant leadership overhaul to date and is designed to ensure Mastodon’s longevity.
As part of the reorganization, Mastodon will be governed by a board of directors that currently includes Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, Karien Bezuidenhout, Esraa Al Shafei, Mastodon community director Hannah Aubrey (who is retiring), and Felix Hlatky, who will take on the role of executive director.
This transformation gives Mastodon the potential to expand its business, products, and mission without relying on one person’s leadership. This will also be a break for Rochko, who has focused solely on Mastodon for the past decade.
Mr. Rochko will continue to contribute to Mastodon as an advisor. Mr Rochko also received a one-off compensation of €1 million, taking into account the years of below fair market salary he received while building Mastodon.
Other members of the new management team include Renaud Chaput as technical director, Andy Piper as head of communications, and Philip Schröpel as strategy and product advisor. Mastodon has a total of 10 full-time employees.
CEO says burnout was a factor in his decision
Rochko said he knew it was time to step back because Mastodon had grown bigger than he could manage on his own and he was also facing burnout.
“[Mastodon]has become synonymous with my identity. I can’t go anywhere and see something about social media without thinking about how it impacts my work,” Rochko explained in an interview with TechCrunch. “I want it to be successful, and that led to a lot of stress and obviously ultimately burnout,” he continued.
“I think by taking a step back and understanding that this is not just about me anymore, that other people are involved and other people are responsible for this, I can restore some balance to my life.”
He also suggested that others should do the same if possible.
“I think it’s definitely not healthy to invest all your time into work, because when you’re done, there’s nothing left,” Rochko added.
This message is at odds with the new “work until you die” ethos that has permeated Silicon Valley in the AI era, where founders have embraced a hustle culture and even China’s grueling “996” work schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week).
What’s next: Going nonprofit
As a nonprofit organization, Mastodon will be able to open up new funding opportunities, especially in Europe, said Hlatky, the new executive director.
The organization has already transitioned to nonprofit status in the United States, but is still working on creating a nonprofit in Belgium to replace the German organization that lost its nonprofit status last year. Once established, this Belgian non-profit organization will be its future home. In the meantime, a U.S.-based 501(c)(3)c nonprofit organization will own the trademarks and other assets.
To help with the transition, Mastodon raised funding from Stack Exchange founder Jeff Atwood and the Atwood family (who donated €2.2 million). Biz Stone. Alternative app marketplace AltStore (€260,000), Global Chinese Community of Universal Digital Commons (€65,000). and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.
Mr. Hlatky has business and finance experience in the technology industry and provided pro bono consulting to Mastodon prior to this transition and helped establish Mastodon’s German non-profit organization.
Through his work, he says, he became disillusioned with the typical startup system involving venture capital.
“It works for outliers, but it doesn’t work for everything else,” says Hlatky. “I got tired of the system and didn’t see the point in contributing to it anymore.”
In his new role, Hlatky will have more conversations with industry players and the media, and believes there is an opportunity to get politicians, political parties and journalists more involved with the platform.
He will also help oversee projects to make Mastodon more financially sustainable, including new hosting and moderation businesses. Other members of the leadership team will also focus on trust and safety issues, technology infrastructure, and products.
One thing Mastodon doesn’t focus on is native interoperability between its platform powered by the ActivityPub protocol and other decentralized social networks like Bluesky, which runs on the AT protocol, or nostr, the protocol favored by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Instead, Mastodon will leave interoperability to the creators of third-party projects like Bridgy Fed and Bounce. (These various protocols are essentially competing technical standards for how decentralized social networks communicate.)
By rebuilding Mastodon, Rochko believes Mastodon can maintain its status as a “billionaire-friendly” social media platform. This mission statement has also been adopted by Bluesky, a network that has grown larger than Mastodon, with 40 million registered users compared to Mastodon’s 10 million. Both networks have a small number of monthly active users.
Mastodon’s monthly active users have fallen to less than 1 million, following a sharp increase in 2022 following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Before the deal closed, Mastodon had only about 200,000 monthly active users, Rochko noted. After that, it jumped to 2 million.
He believes this shows demand for platforms that are not controlled by billionaires.
“Threads, Instagram, Facebook belong to billionaires. “And Mastodon is one of the very few, if not the only, of these organizations and social media platforms, and the Fediverse as a whole, that hasn’t been affected by something like that,” Rochko said.
