Mastodon CEO steps down as the social network restructures
Mastodon CEO steps down as the social network restructures
techcrunch.com
Mastodon CEO steps down as the social network restructures | TechCrunch
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The organization has already transitioned to a nonprofit in the U.S. but is still working to set up a nonprofit in Belgium, or an AISBL, to replace the German entity, which lost its nonprofit status last year. Once established, the Belgian nonprofit will be the future home of the organization. In the meantime, the U.S.-based 501(c)(3) c nonprofit will own the trademark and other assets.
Very important step.
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You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/my-next-chapter-with-mastodon/
People need to realize that open source projects don't create billionaires. In fact, they actually block billionaires from forming.
Tech deci-millionaires get rich by creating a moat around something, then put a toll booth at the drawbridge. Tech billionaires do that but make sure to enclose something essential they have a monopoly on within the moat, and then capture any and all regulators who might try to interfere. Open Source software either makes it illegal to build a moat or allows anybody who's interested to build their own drawbridge. It's orders of magnitude harder to get rich with open source or free software. You basically have to put up a toll booth that's fully optional and somehow still get people to pay.
We should all thank #JohnMastodon for his selfless acts, both starting Mastodon but also now knowing when to step down.
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and yet i still dont know how to use mastodon
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What are you struggling with? Look for a server (that isn't mastodon.social) that fits your interests, sign up, browse the local or global timeline, follow interesing people, have fun!
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Not OP, but...
Finding a single server that fits my interests is the first stumbling block. I follow 30-40 communities here, so I need to pick just one focus, which kinda sucks, TBF.
So I picked one, It was too quiet, but it was a start, then I started looking for interesting people. Hardly anyone famous, the few that I did find ended up being the ones that turned out to be creeps in the news, even assuming they were real accounts, which is probably a generous assumption. When I finally found the few people I wanted to follow, they gradually disappeared over time to Bluesky.
WIth their community lines being split per server and no discovery other than randomly finding someone with your tastes while bebopping around on your server. It wasn't a good experience.
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I use mastodon.social and i have nearly 300 followers here. I dont know any server nor i do know how to find one that match with my interests. I am interested in generally anime, visual novel, jpop, art lgbt etc. twitter is one central website that servs all kind of people at once so it is not very quiet. mastodon.social is both quiet and I am having struggles to find someone famous and interesting entertaining here. Like bro on my feed posting something and gets zero likes. I do the same and the same happens to me.
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\ as rumba@lemmy.zip also states that the inactivity here is a major problem i also did the same my account here is from 2023 and we are about to enter 2026. I am also a dead account here. -
You know people told me to do this with Lemmy and I ended up choosing a lemmy.ml . I found out later I guess that’s the Antichrist and I shouldn’t have done that. What’s the best way to understand what server is kosher?
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Have you tried?
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yup commented the details below.
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Thank you Eugen, for everything.
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But will they continue to moderate content by German leftist standards?
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Why
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Read the article!?
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I also recommend reading Eugen Rochko's own post about it, as Andy Piper linked to as well.
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Articles are incentivized to elaborate beyond what is even remotely necessary, link back to no one but themselves themselves, repeatedly, and to serve ads and extract personal information for sale while they're doing it.
So you'll have to excuse some of us looking for the tl;dr
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read https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/my-next-chapter-with-mastodon/ and https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-together/
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Thank you for sharing
Mastodon is bigger than me, and though the technology we develop on is itself decentralized—with heaps of alternative fediverse projects demonstrating that participation in this ecosystem is possible without our involvement—it benefits our community to ensure that the project itself which so many people have come to love and depend on remains true to its values. There are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities, and while I’d like to think myself an exception, I understand why people would prefer better guardrails.
That's nice of him to acknowledge that.
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I love and hate how Eugen starts this whole project, leads it into being something truly unique and wonderful that directly challenges some of the most evil and wealthy people on the planet, sets up institutional guardrails to make sure it will not be corrupted by any one individual gone mad with power, gives away his position after 10 years once he's sure the organization is in good hands, and then concludes in reflection that he does not "have the right personality" for running a project like this.
I hope it has not been to hard for him, and that he'll look back at it all as a positive experience in spite of the negative interactions. I don't think any sane person has a personality that is "right" for the kind of abuse public figures receive on the internet. But from the perspective of Mastodon and the Fediverse, it seems pretty clear that he was exactly the right type of personality for the job—including by stepping down when the time felt right.
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That first post is very good. I really appreciate the way he's handled the first 10 years, and I hope he has fun doing whatever he does next.
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Respect. He built something bigger than him and then knew that it was time to transition.