Eugen Rochko, CEO and founder of decentralized social network Mastodon, is stepping down after nearly a decade at the helm and walking away with a sizable exit payment.
“Mastodon grew beyond any of my expectations,” he said. “The past two years especially have been overwhelming, and my mental and physical health have taken a dip.”
Rochko’s move has, by his own admission, been a while coming. In April 2024, the establishment of a US nonprofit was announced with a governing board of directors that included Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Rochko also announced that his ownership of the trademark and other assets were headed to the nonprofit.
Mastodon is a federated network of independently managed servers. Each server has its own rules and regulations, which are enforced locally rather than by a corporate overlord. The ActivityPub protocol is used for federation.
Rochko’s move to an advisory role, out of the public eye, will take two to three months, and he said his departure was “an opportunity for me to regain some work-life balance.” He also noted that it was an opportunity for Mastodon to “avoid some ego and trademark-related pitfalls that other large open source projects have recently experienced.”
While a blow to the Fediverse community, Rochko’s decision is understandable. Mastodon experienced significant growth immediately after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now renamed X), driven by users seeking an alternative. That growth has sharply dropped away, with some sources suggesting that Mastodon reached over 2.5 million monthly active users at its peak before falling back to approximately 750,000 more recently.
As well as noting the toll the last few years had taken on him, Rochko said: “There was a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer that made me realize that I need to take a step back and find a healthier relationship with the project, ultimately serving as the impetus to begin this restructuring process.”
Rochko is to be given a one-time payment of one million euros in recognition of his efforts building Mastodon, “while taking less than a fair market salary.”
Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Element and co-founder of the decentralized Matrix open source project, told The Register: “Running a major open source project is not much fun at the best of times, but it’s particularly bad for social projects like Mastodon or Matrix where there are sky-high expectations to rescue us from the dystopian hellscape of X, Facebook or other centralized platforms of the surveillance capitalism industry.
“Unhappy users tend to be disproportionately loud given the issues at stake, and there’s a huge risk of optimizing to appease those who shout loudest in the short-term rather than find medium-term solutions which solve for everyone.
“It doesn’t help that those using the platform to talk about the platform creates an echo chamber. This drains an incredible amount of energy, and the open source ‘valley of death’ is getting caught in concerns about purity and competing with each other (e.g. ActivityPub vs ATProto vs Nostr, or Matrix vs XMPP vs IRC etc.) rather than focusing on building a viable alternative to Big Tech.”
Hodgson concluded that the most significant challenge facing decentralized social media and communication projects wasn’t so much choosing a protocol as preserving privacy while preventing accounts from becoming horrid or spewing propaganda, all without depending on a centralized gatekeeper.
“This is not yet a solved problem,” he said, “and it can be daunting to realize that the secret to successful decentralization is the fundamentally human problem of how to help protect people from other people being unpleasant on the internet.” ®