Mastodon, a well-known decentralized social network, announced major personnel changes on November 18. Founder Eugen Rochko has officially stepped down as CEO (CEO) due to organizational restructuring. Original consultant Felix Hlatky will take over as executive director. The company will also transform into a non-profit structure managed by the board of directors to ensure the continued development and long-term stability of the platform.
The adjusted board of directors includes Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, Karien Bezuidenhout, Esra’a Al Shafei, Mastodon community director Hannah Aubry (outgoing) and new executive director Felix Hlatky. With this leadership reshuffle, Mastodon will seek to further expand its business, products and mission in the future without relying on a single leader. At the same time, this also brought some breathing space for Rochko. Rochko, who has been highly focused on Mastodon for the past decade, will transition to working as a platform advisor after stepping down and will receive a one-time compensation of €1 million to make up for his years of below-market wages.
The new leadership team also includes technical director Renaud Chaput, head of communications Andy Piper and strategy and product advisor Philip Schröpel. Currently, Mastodon has 10 full-time employees.
Regarding the reason for his resignation, Rochko said that as Mastodon continued to expand, it was difficult for him to manage all affairs alone, and he suffered from greater pressure and burnout. He admitted that it is not advisable to devote all his time to work, and he also hopes to set an example for restoring balance to his personal life by withdrawing from the front line.
Mastodon will successfully complete the transition to a non-profit organization in the future. New executive director Hlatky pointed out that the non-profit status will help Mastodon obtain more financial support from Europe. Currently, Mastodon has completed non-profit certification in the United States and is promoting registration with the Belgian AISBL to replace the German legal entity that lost its non-profit status last year. The Belgian non-profit entity will become the main carrier of the organization's future, and the American 501(c)(3) non-profit organization will hold assets such as brand trademarks.
In terms of fundraising, this transformation has received strong support from Stack Exchange founder Jeff Atwood and his family (2.2 million euros), Biz Stone, AltStore application market (260,000 euros), Global Chinese Digital Commons (65,000 euros) and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. Hlatky himself has a rich business and financial background in the technology field, and has assisted Mastodon to establish a German non-profit organization free of charge. He said that he is tired of the traditional venture capital entrepreneurial model, and hopes to have more exchanges with the industry, media and political circles under the new structure to promote the sustainable financial development of Mastodon, including hosting and content review business.
It is worth noting that Mastodon will not actively develop native interoperability solutions with other decentralized social networks based on the ActivityPub protocol such as Bluesky (AT protocol) or Nostr. Instead, the relevant work will be handed over to third-party projects such as Bridgy Fed and Bounce. These protocols propose different technical standards for the decentralized social field.
Rochko emphasized that the restructuring is intended to strengthen Mastodon’s positioning as a “billionaire-immune” social media platform. This concept has also been adopted by the rapidly growing Bluesky. Currently, Bluesky has 40 million registered users and Mastodon has 10 million, but both active users are far lower than the number of registered users. It is reported that Mastodon’s monthly active users have recently dropped to less than 1 million, which is a significant decline from the 200,000 before Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and the surge to two million after the acquisition. Rochko pointed out that this reflects the global demand for social platforms controlled by non-billionaires.
He added: "Threads, Instagram and Facebook are all owned by billionaires, and so is X... These platforms are gradually controlled by wealthy individuals and are exerting increasing influence in guiding public opinion and politics. Mastodon and its federated universe are one of the few platforms that have not been affected by this."