The creator of Mastodon, Eugene Rochkois stepping down as CEO of open source, decentralized social network and competitor X as part of the organization’s transition to a non-profit structure, announced earlier this year. The change is Mastodon’s most significant leadership reshuffle to date, and one designed to ensure Mastodon’s longevity.
As part of the restructuring of the organization, Mastodon will be governed by a board of directors, which currently includes Twitter Biz Stone co-founder Karien Bezuidenhout, Esra’a Al Shafei, Mastodon community manager Hannah Aubry (who will step down), and Felix Hlatkywho will assume the role of Executive Director.
With the renewal, Mastodon has the ability to expand its operations, its product and its mission, without depending on one person’s leadership. It will also give Rochko a break as he has been solely focused on Mastodon for the last ten years.
Going forward, Rochko will continue to contribute to Mastodon as a consultant. Rochko has also been compensated with a one-time payment of €1 million, given that he received less than a fair market wage over the years during the making of Mastodon.
Other members of the new leadership team are Renaud Chaput as Technical Director, Andy Piper as Head of Communications and Philip Schröpel as Strategy & Product Advisor. In total, Mastodon has 10 full-time employees.
The CEO says burnout was a factor in his decision
Rochko said he knew it was time to step aside because Mastodon had become bigger than he could handle on his own and because he was also facing burnout.
“[Mastodon has] it became somewhat synonymous with my identity. I can’t look somewhere and see something about social media without thinking about how it affects my work,” Rochko explained in an interview with TechCrunch. “I want him to succeed. And it led to a lot of stress, and obviously, it ultimately led to burnout,” he continued.
“I think taking a step back, realizing that this isn’t just me anymore — now other people are involved, other people are responsible for this — will allow me to restore some balance in my life.”
He also suggested that others do the same if they can.
“I definitely think that investing all your time in work is not healthy, because then, you will be left with nothing,” added Rochko.
This message is at odds with the new ethos inspiring Silicon Valley in the age of artificial intelligence, where founders are embracing the hustle culture and indeed China’s intense ‘996’ work program (works 9am to 9pm, six days a week).
What’s next: the nonprofit transition
As a non-profit organization, Mastodon will be able to unlock new funding opportunities, particularly in Europe, noted new CEO Hlatky.
The organization has already transitioned to a non-profit in the US but is still working on establishing a non-profit in Belgium or AISBLto replace the German entity, which lost its non-profit status last year. Once established, the Belgian non-profit will be the organization’s future home. In the meantime, the US-based 501(c)(3) c non-profit organization will own the trademark and other assets.
To help with the transition, Mastodon raised funds from the founder of Stack Exchange Jeff Atwood and the Atwood family (who gave €2.2 million). Biz Stone; alternative AltStore application market (260 thousand euros), the Global Chinese Community Universal Digital Commons (65 thousand euros) and founder of Craigslist Craig Newmark.
Hlatky, who has a business and finances background in technology, he consulted pro bono for Mastodon prior to this transition, having helped the organization establish its German nonprofit.
He says that through his work, he had become disillusioned with the typical startup system involving venture capital.
“It works for the extremes, but for everything else, it doesn’t,” Hlatky said. “I just got fed up with the system and didn’t see any point in contributing to the system anymore.”
In his new position, Hlatky will engage in more conversations with industry stakeholders and the media, and sees an opportunity to have politicians, political parties and journalists more involved in the platform.
He will also help oversee projects that will make Mastodon more financially viable, including the new hosting and coordination business. Other members of the leadership team will also focus on trust and security, technical infrastructure and product.
One thing Mastodon won’t be focusing on is any kind of native interoperability between its platform, which is powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and other decentralized social networks like Bluesky — which runs on the AT protocol — or those running on nostr, a protocol favored by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Instead, Mastodon will leave interoperability to third-party project builders like Bridgy Fed and Bounce. (These different protocols are essentially competing technical standards for how decentralized social networks communicate.)
With Mastodon’s restructuring, Rochko believes the organization will maintain its position as a “billionaire” social media. This mission statement has also adopted by Blueskya network that has grown more than Mastodon with 40 million registered users, compared to Mastodon’s 10 million. On both networks, a smaller number of these users are active on a monthly basis.
At Mastodon, monthly active users have since fallen to less than 1 million, following a spike in 2022 that came after Elon Musk bought Twitter. Before the deal closed, Mastodon only had about 200,000 monthly active users, Rochko noted. then, it jumped to 2 million.
This, he believes, shows demand for a platform not controlled by a billionaire.
“Threads, Instagram and Facebook are owned by a billionaire. X is owned by a billionaire … All of these platforms are owned by extremely wealthy people, and they are increasingly using these platforms to direct public perception, public debate and policy,” he noted. “And Mastodon is one of the few — if not the only — of these social media organizations and platforms — and the fediverse as a whole, I guess — that isn’t subject to this,” Rochko said.
