According to TheRegister.com, Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko is stepping down after nearly a decade leading the decentralized social network, citing burnout and mental health struggles. He’ll receive a one-time payment of one million euros for his work building the platform while taking “less than a fair market salary.” The transition to an advisory role will take 2-3 months and follows the establishment of a US nonprofit in April 2024 with a board including Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Mastodon’s user base peaked at over 2.5 million monthly active users after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover before falling back to approximately 750,000 recently. Rochko specifically mentioned a “particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” that accelerated his decision to step back.
The brutal reality of running decentralized platforms
Here’s the thing about running a decentralized social network: it sounds noble until you actually have to do it. Rochko’s burnout isn’t surprising when you consider what he’s been dealing with. Mastodon exploded overnight when Elon Musk bought Twitter, going from niche project to potential Twitter killer in what felt like minutes. That kind of pressure would break most people.
And the numbers tell a brutal story. Going from 2.5 million active users down to 750,000? That’s not just slowing growth—that’s a mass exodus. It shows how fickle the anti-Twitter crowd can be. People want alternatives to Big Tech until they realize decentralized platforms require actual work to use and understand.
Why open source leadership is so draining
Matthew Hodgson from Matrix nailed it when he described the “open source valley of death.” These projects get caught in purity wars—ActivityPub vs ATProto vs Nostr—instead of actually building viable alternatives. And the users? Unhappy decentralized social media users might be the most vocal demographic on the internet.
Think about it. You’re trying to build this idealistic platform free from corporate control, but your most engaged users are constantly complaining about how you’re not idealistic enough. It creates this toxic echo chamber where the people talking about the platform are… well, mostly people talking about the platform. No wonder Rochko hit a wall after that bad user interaction last summer.
Where does Mastodon go from here?
So what happens now? The move to a nonprofit structure with Biz Stone involved actually seems pretty smart. It gets the trademarks and assets out of Rochko’s personal control and creates more sustainable governance. But let’s be real—losing your founder and visionary is never easy.
The fundamental problem Hodgson identified still stands: how do you preserve privacy while preventing platforms from becoming cesspools, all without centralized moderation? That’s the billion-dollar question nobody has solved yet. Mastodon’s various server instances can have their own rules, but that fragmentation creates its own headaches.
The bigger decentralized social media struggle
Basically, Rochko’s departure highlights a painful truth about the fediverse. Building decentralized alternatives to Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms is incredibly hard work that rarely pays off—literally or emotionally. The €1 million payout sounds nice until you realize he built one of the most prominent Twitter alternatives and that’s his exit after nearly ten years.
Meanwhile, the analytics show user numbers collapsing back to earth. It makes you wonder: are decentralized social networks destined to remain niche communities for the technically inclined? Or can they actually compete with the convenience (and toxicity) of centralized platforms?
Rochko’s personal announcement about needing work-life balance is completely understandable. But his departure leaves a huge question mark over whether Mastodon—and the broader fediverse—can ever become more than just a protest vote against Big Tech.
