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Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko talks about funding and how to build an anti-Twitter tool • TechCrunch

Eugen Rochko came up with the idea and built Mastodon about six years ago during another Twitter downturn. As a developer interested and working with open source software, he got the idea for Mastodon from an affiliate version of a forum he built in high school.

That project was called Zeon Federated, and it no longer works. While growing that, he also built and sold a platform to manage margin for artists around commissions.

Mastodon’s success somewhat surprised its creator. Rochko is not involved in this project as an effective social media user, nor is he inclined to share much about himself. As we spoke, he dialed into our video chat from an undisclosed location. He’s never even used Instagram. If growth professionals see building an audience or revenue as an end in themselves, Rochko seems to be the opposite when it comes to growth.

This week, we spoke with Rochko about Mastodon’s early days, its recent spike in users, and how advertising may or may not affect its future.


TechCrunch: You’ve probably seen significant growth over the past six weeks or so. Has the growth rate stayed the same, increased or decreased since the early days of the transfer to Elon Musk? How many users and servers do you currently have?

Eugene Rochko: If you look at the chart, we’ve had a big spike around the news of Elon Musk buying Twitter. And there was another spike when Musk laid off most of the staff at Twitter. It has dropped now, but the rate is much higher than it was before October. We currently have 2.5 million monthly active users on Mastodon, across 8,600 servers.

We don’t chart the growth rate, but currently, app downloads on iOS and Android are around 4,000 per day. The biggest spike we saw was when Musk laid off employees — we had 149,000 downloads on Android and 235,000 on iOS. Over the past 90 days, the iOS app has had 1.8 million downloads. Android provides different metrics, but in October, the audience with Android apps installed was 53,000 devices. Now, it’s 907,000 devices.

I can’t give you much information on whether mobile is more popular than desktop: I don’t track that. We haven’t built a dashboard for that yet.

“Moderation is not automation friendly. The cases are so simple that even one person can do it in a few seconds. And when it’s complicated, no automation can help. It requires a human to understand the context of the situation and make the call.” Eugen Rochko

TC: You say “we,” but how many people do you have in Mastodon?

Rochko: I am the only full-time employee and the rest — five — are currently contractors. I’m looking to expand my team full time and working on some job listings. It’s a slow process; I wish I could do it a lot faster. But it’s a new frontier for a company that has been in a joint venture with one for six years. So far it’s been fine, but now we need more people.

TC: Is Patreon the only vehicle you’ve used to fund it so far?

Rochko: Patreon is the main one. We also built a custom funding platform when a business wants to sponsor us to save on Patreon fees. This year, we also received a publicity grant from the European Commission to fund some of the work on features. But mostly, it’s Patreon.

TC: So most of that money comes from about 8,500 backers up there…

Rochko: Yes, that brings in $31,000 per month. That number has increased dramatically over the past month — it was just $7,000 last month. That’s the only reason we can’t even think of getting a new employee.

This is the scary part of running a donation-based nonprofit. I am solely responsible if the contributions run out, but if you hire someone else and the contributions stop, suddenly you are responsible for someone else’s livelihood. It is a stop to attract others as former employees.

I think there are some buffers now, so we want to get some more people involved.



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