Evolving the Team

As Mastodon continues to evolve and grow, we’re excited to announce several changes to our team (and also, to offer a brief update on our restructuring).

Restructuring Progress

We’re currently forming a new foundation in Europe as a new home for the project and its assets. The terms papers have been finalised, and the process is underway. We’ll have more concrete information to share in the near future, but for now, we wanted to provide a short update that the transition we previously announced is happening.

Board Updates

Our U.S.-based 501(c)(3) organization continues to serve as both a fundraising entity, and as a resource in sharing its board members’ advice and experience. We’re deeply grateful to Amir Ghavi for his legal guidance during our structural transition. With his formal support of this process, Amir has recently stepped down from his board responsibilities.

We’re delighted to welcome Hannah Aubry as a new 501(c)(3) board member! Hannah was a great partner and champion of the project during her time running the Fast Forward program at Fastly, and as part of our outreach team. She brings her valuable experience in community, communications, and free and open-source software to share with our leadership team.

Recent Team Changes

We’ve made some additions and change to the team.

If you’ve been following our Trunk & Tidbits series, you will already know that David, Shannon and Echo joined the core engineering team in the past year. We’re also very happy to share that Scott Jenson has joined the organisation on a part-time basis, as Product Strategy Adviser. We have a couple of additional folks joining shortly, so watch this space.

In addition, there are some updates to the operational side of the organisation:

• Andy Piper is now Head of Communications. Andy was previously working to support our Developer Relations efforts on a freelance basis, and transitioned to lead communications across the project.
• Philip Schröpel has taken on the role of Chief of Staff. Philip joined the Mastodon team as a Finance Associate in 2024. He is now leading a range of projects across Mastodon’s operations and partnerships.
• Zora Steiner is joining us on 2 May as a Junior Project Manager, to support the team with a wide range of projects within Business Operations, like fundraising, grant applications, marketing and more.

We’ll have more to share about specific roles on the team as the transition to the new structure is finalised.

Looking Ahead

These changes reflect a commitment to building a stable organisation while maintaining our core mission: creating tools and digital spaces for authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, and corporate monopolies.

While the team has grown substantially over the past 2 to 3 years, we’re still a small team of 15 people (with only 3 part-time/freelance team members). That’s a big change considering less than 2 years ago, we were a team of just 3 full-time engineers - however, it also reflects the diverse range of tasks we’re working on. There is a lot more to the project than just the code!

Mastodon has taken the strategic decision not to accept venture capital investments for growth, but rather restructure to a European non-profit organisation. This means that we’re reliant on your support to build a team to work full-time on new product features, maintain mastodon.social and mastodon.online, and represent Mastodon and the broader Fediverse to policy makers and to media organisations. The elements of our mission related to an open internet, privacy, and data ownership are more important than ever.

We’ll share more news on all of these topics - our restructuring, people, and mission - in the coming months. In the meantime, be sure to follow us on Mastodon, where you’ll start to see us share a broader range of updates - including news about events we’re attending, and other initiatives.