The Future is Ours to Build - Together

Earlier this year, we announced that Mastodon would be transitioning its legal and operational structures to better reflect our mission.

Today, we’re marking another momentous step in this ongoing process as our Founder and now former CEO Eugen Rochko begins his transition into a new role with Mastodon. We are thrilled that he will continue on in an advisory role with our team.

In this post, we’re looking ahead to what comes next. We’re pleased to introduce Mastodon’s new leadership team, and share some other exciting updates.

Meet The Team

When we first set out to design a leadership structure for Mastodon, our aim was to represent the needs of Mastodon as a software project, and the needs of the people that make up the Mastodon community. We also wanted to create a structure that would balance fast decision-making with including more voices at the table.

• Executive Director: Felix Hlatky

  Felix has been involved with Mastodon since March 2020. He cares about Mastodon and the Fediverse because it feels like the single most impactful project touching diverse areas such as freedom of expression, politics, media, and technology. As Mastodon’s Executive Director, he’s excited to grow the user base across Mastodon and the Fediverse. His goals include simplifying the process of running servers safely and efficiently, expanding the team to better compete with commercial platforms, and ensuring the project’s long-term financial sustainability, so Mastodon can remain independent forever. You can get in touch with him at @mellifluousbox@mastodon.social.

• Technical Director: Renaud Chaput

  Renaud has been involved with Mastodon since late 2022, first working on the project infrastructure, then as CTO. Over the last three years, he’s been instrumental in growing the Mastodon engineering team (now nine people), shipping new features, and establishing more efficient development processes. He’s excited to continue building a strong and modern open-source social media platform as Mastodon’s Technical Director. You can get in touch with him at @renchap@oisaur.com.

• Community Director: Hannah Aubry

  Hannah has been involved with Mastodon since early 2023, first as a partner and champion of the project during her time running the Fast Forward program at Fastly, then as a volunteer on our outreach team. Earlier this year, she joined our Board of Directors. In her role as Community Director, she’ll oversee the strategy and growth of Mastodon’s community and trust & safety programmes. She brings her valuable experience in community, social media, and free and open-source software. You can get in touch with her at @haubles@hachyderm.io.

An extended leadership team includes Eugen Rochko, Andy Piper, and Philip Schröpel. As Strategy & Product Advisor, Eugen will leverage his deep knowledge about the Fediverse / social media and product expertise to support Mastodon’s long-term vision and development. Andy will continue in his role as Head of Communications, and Philip as Chief of Staff.

Our next step is to build more ways for the community to get involved with Mastodon at all levels. Our efforts to define community governance are well underway, and we’re looking forward to getting everyone involved in that soon. With that in mind — are you someone who wants to get involved with Mastodon? We’d love to hear from you!

Organisational Update

A vital aspect of our restructuring initiative is transitioning Mastodon to a new European not-for-profit entity. Our intent is to form a Belgian AISBL as the future home of the Mastodon organisation.

As an update on our current status, Mastodon is continuing to run day-to-day operations through the Mastodon gGmbH entity (the Mastodon gGmbH entity automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status being stripped away in Germany). The US-based 501(c)(3) continues to function as a strategic overlay and fundraising hub, and as a short-term solution until the AISBL is ready, the 501(c)(3) will own the trademark and other assets. We intend to transfer those assets as soon as the AISBL is ready. To enable tax-deductible donations for German donors, we partnered with WE AID as our fiscal sponsor.

In the meantime, we’re moving forward with defining who we are, how we operate as a team, and how we engage more transparently with the community. To start, we sat down and defined our vision, mission, and values. We’ll be publishing these on our blog soon. Stay tuned!

A Fundraising Update

When we announced our restructuring earlier this year, we asked for your help with fundraising, to support us in furthering our efforts around usability, discovery, and trust & safety. With their express consent to disclose, we deeply appreciate the generosity of Jeff Atwood and the Atwood Family (EUR 2.2M), Biz Stone, AltStore (EUR 260k), GCC (EUR 65k), and Craig Newmark. We’re excited to share how we’ve put your contributions to good use.

One of our main expenditures from the fundraising initiative has been hiring across our engineering, product, marketing, and operations. Our larger team is making it possible to move faster on important new features like launching Quote Posts, co-developing Mastodon’s Collections (our take on “Starter Packs”), and thinking big thoughts about Mastodon v5.0 (👀). What’s more, our larger team has made it possible to launch our commercial service offerings — an important step to ensuring organisations without the technical and moderation resources to start a Mastodon server can finally do so while contributing to our long-term financial sustainability.

For our team, a vital aspect of getting this restructuring right was making sure that Eugen was compensated fairly for Mastodon’s brand trademark, assets, and the 10 years he spent building Mastodon into what it is today (while taking less than a fair market salary). Based on replacement costs, Eugen’s time and effort, and the fair market value of the Mastodon brand, its associated properties, and the social network, we settled on a one-time compensation of EUR 1M. We are deeply grateful for his past contributions, and look forward to his contributions still to come.

We want to thank the generous individual donors that participated in our fundraising drive. We put individual donations entirely towards Mastodon’s operations (primarily, paying our full-time employees to improve Mastodon), which totalled EUR 337k over the past 12 months (September 2024 - September 2025).

We also want to thank the law firm Paul Hastings for their generous support by advising us pro bono.

What’s Next

So what’s next for our team? A different configuration but the same mission: Ensure that our online social spaces belong to the people forever, and provide a safe place for public discourse.

If you believe in that mission too, we’d love your support. Grassroots efforts like Mastodon and the Fediverse require creative and monetary contributions from their communities to survive. It will take all of us working together to build resilient, governable, open and safe digital spaces.