Mastodon’s creator, Eugen Rochko, is stepping back as chief executive as the decentralized social network formalizes a nonprofit structure and puts day-to-day leadership in the hands of a board and an executive director. The move is described as the platform’s most significant governance change to date, with the goal of better insulating Mastodon, making it less personality-driven and more capable of serving the larger fediverse.
Rochko will become an adviser and receive a one-time payment of €1 million in recognition that he has been paid below market rates for years while building the service. Mastodon says it has 10 full-time staff and is reorganizing to have product, trust and safety, infrastructure, and communications take place in larger teams rather than being led by a single founder.
A Nonprofit Route To Enduring Governance
Mastodon has already formed a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) and is seeking to become a Belgian AISBL to be its long-term home, replacing an earlier German version that lost its nonprofit status.
In the meantime, important assets and trademarks are held by the U.S. nonprofit while the Belgian one is established.
Leaders say the nonprofit model helps the company fulfill its public-interest mission and puts it in a position to access alternative streams of revenue — particularly in Europe, where philanthropy and public grants are available only to not-for-profit organizations. It also codifies a governance model that transcends any particular executive, an ongoing difficulty for open-source projects as they grow.
A New Leadership and Operating Model for Mastodon
The new board members are Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Karien Bezuidenhout, and human rights activist Esra’a Al Shafei. Hannah Aubry, community director and founder of Mastodon’s queer.social instance, is leaving the board; she consulted for Mastodon on previous nonprofit work.
On the operating side, Renaud Chaput takes over as technical director, Andy Piper leads communications, and Philip Schröpel will advise in the areas of strategy and product. Hlatky, who has a finance and tech background, hasn’t hidden his skepticism about the feasibility of mapping venture-capital dynamics to public-interest social platforms in a sustainable way; the long-term outlook favors sound stability choices over world-eating blitzscaling.
Funding and Sustainability Strategy for Mastodon’s Future
Mastodon is supported in this transition by new funding from Jeff Atwood and the Atwood family (€2.2M), Biz Stone, alternative app marketplace AltStore (€260k), the Global Chinese Community of Universal Digital Commons (€65k), and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. The organization is also growing service revenue, including hosting and moderation options to assist server administrators in running compliant, well-governed instances.
This blended model — grants plus services — parallels sustainability pathways of other mission-driven tech nonprofits. It cuts down on dependence solely on donations, all the while keeping the major part of their software free and open source. Institutional users such as newsrooms or civic groups could help lower the barriers to participation in the fediverse by way of managed hosting and moderation.
Product Direction and the Politics of Protocols
The service is still oriented around the ActivityPub protocol, a sort of federated successor to RSS that’s maintained by the W3C and powers much (though not all) of the growing fediverse. Leadership tells TechCrunch that it will not incorporate native interoperability with competing decentralized stacks like Bluesky’s AT Protocol or Nostr. Instead, bridging will be a task for third-party initiatives such as Bridgy Fed and Bounce to tackle.
Keeping focused on ActivityPub is an important part of what lets Mastodon’s engineering scope remain tight at a time when it needs to be prioritizing reliability, moderation tooling, and accessibility. It’s also based on a practical understanding of protocol politics: the fastest way to a coherent user experience is by making a bet inside one widely adopted standard, not among several competing ones.
User Growth Background And Competitive Landscape
Mastodon now has about 10 million accounts registered there with less than 1 million monthly actives. Usage spiked to about 2 million monthly actives after the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, from roughly 200,000 prior — then settled back. The spike underscored a simmering demand for “billionaire-proof” social media — services protected from the whims of a single owner.
Competition remains fierce. Bluesky claims to have about 40 million registered users, and the centralized incumbents X, Instagram, and Facebook continue to put a stranglehold on the cultural mainstream. Mastodon is betting that transparent governance, open protocols, and community-operated servers will stand the test of time better than engagement-optimized feeds controlled by corporate landlords.
What to Watch Next as Mastodon Reshapes Governance
Completing the Belgian AISBL will establish a long-term governance framework and clarify the U.S.-EU split. Look for more outreach to policymakers, newsrooms, and public-interest advocates as Mastodon tries to focus on being infrastructure for civil-society conversation instead of an ad-driven attention market.
On the product side, keep an eye out for continued investment in moderation, safety tooling, and managed hosting. Those are the levers most likely to penetrate institutional adoption and slow growth, without sacrificing the network’s decentralized nature.
If Mastodon can combine a nonprofit governance structure with trustworthy service and a consistent user experience, it could position itself as the flagship client for ActivityPub, which would have far-reaching ramifications beyond just one app and influence how the broader fediverse network will operate.