I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
Mood
thoughtful
Sentiment
mixed
Category
tech
Key topics
Mastodon
decentralized social media
open-source
leadership transition
The CEO of Mastodon is stepping down after 10 years, transferring ownership to a non-profit, and sparking discussion about the project's future, decentralization, and the challenges of leading a social media platform.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
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- 01Story posted
11/18/2025, 6:13:30 PM
1d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
11/18/2025, 8:43:13 PM
2h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
69 comments in Hour 4
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Step 03 - 04Latest activity
11/19/2025, 11:34:37 AM
7h ago
Step 04
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Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Or the Twitter fight where he encouraged people to DOS the rival.
Or the account takeover CVE and repercussions.
Because both protocols can actually interface together, we had people on both side of the 2 networks talking to each other in the same thread (which is truly impressive when you think about it)
(I read it the same way, too.)
(¹I personally have a browser override for HN's tiny font choice; I thought that 12pt was the universally agreed upon "base text" point size, and "10pt" was "small text", but HN's "normal" is 9pt.)
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-col...
Kerning?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning
Also, if that was the mistake, it's kinda funny given the likelihood it was caused by a kerning issue.
E.g., reddit.com/r/keming
@ 4% that's €40k/year
more than what most regular people have
Also where do you get from that you can't retire with €1M. It seems very feasible as long as you keep a frugal lifestyle.
Where I live (not expensive like SV), they recommend $90K+ to "live comfortably".
A 1 bedroom apartment is $19K/year. Insurance rates vary widely, but premium + deductible - you may want to assume $10K/year. So you're already at $30K without eating, Internet, utility bills and transportation.
I'm sure one could live off of that 1M if fairly frugal, but it's not what most people want.
Now I believe he is in Europe so different rules apply, but they have similar things there). I don't know the rules in his country (or even his country), some are more friendly than others, but still the money won't go as far when you retire before the system wants you to.
3% of a million is only 30k per year. A frugal person can live on that little - but it will be hard. You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.
Now if you want to retire you don't need your nest egg to last forever, only until you die. You can thus withdraw a bit more than 3%, but I'm not sure how much. (and you may have other pension plans to work with). Still if you withdraw 100k/year from this million you will run out of money in less than 20 years (with 12 being realistic) 100k per year is not a great income for a programmer.
Hey, good for you. But 30k per year is a very good salary in countries such as Spain, where the median salary is just a bit over half that.
I would count moving to a significantly poorer country that you have no connections to in order to get your cost of living down a "frugal" way to stretch out your retirement fund.
I'm in the Puget Sound area of Washington with a paid off house and until a few months ago a paid off car. My new car is financed for a few months while I wait for some CDs to mature which I will use to pay it off. In the following I'm going to treat it as paid off.
The expenses that arise every month (e.g. food/groceries, some insurance premiums, utilities, prescriptions and OTC health stuff) plus the expenses that are yearly or half-yearly (e.g. some insurance premiums, property taxes) converted to monthly comes to a little under $2000/month.
A new Mac every 5 years, an iPad every 5 years, an iPhone every 4, an Apple Watch every 4, and a new car every 10 works out to be equivalent to around $350/month.
That leaves $1800/year out of our $30k/year, which can cover the occasional need to repair or replace a major appliance.
I do have fairly low property taxes thanks to a pretty good senior discount that Washington provides, but Washington is also a high property tax state. If we pick a low property tax state there are a few were someone without a discount would be paying about $800/month more than I'm paying for a comparable house. In one of those states that would leave us $1000/year for the occasional appliance repair or replacement.
You may need to make sure your house is suitable for this. Mine has a well and septic system which can be expensive to fix if they break. That could require drawing down the principle. We'd probably want to pick a house on municipal water and sewage. Also pick one in a milder climate so that we aren't relying on some expensive high capacity heating and/or cooling system. That should keep heating/cooling repairs down.
We also should take another look at that 3% a year withdrawal. We don't need to never run out. We just need to not run out before we die.
We can bump our monthly withdraw up to $3000 and keep that up for around 60 years. With that we've got $7k/year for our maintenance/repairs/replacements.
Another thing we should probably look at is whether we've already done enough work or whatever else is required to qualify for our country's old age benefits someday. If we will be able to start collecting those when we are 65 for example, and we are getting our $1 million at 30, we can withdraw more now than if we have to have the $1 million get us all the way to death.
Or he could scrimp and put four hard years towards making manager at McDonald's. If he gets it, then he can demand they match 44k a year (his passive income at that point) or he walks.
He could then try the same at Wendy's, and walk to retire on 64k a year.
Compound interest is one helluva drug!
> 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).
From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
> 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.
I really hope he's able to find success and better work-life balance in his future endeavours
He made neither the browsers nor the servers that people used, and libwww was so full of bugs and memory leaks that it was heavily modified by those who did, if they used it at all.
The W3C was its own thing.
Keep in mind that every for-profit publicly-owned corporation has many shareholders, as well as a board of directors, which is, gasp, a committee!
At some point, you do have people that need to step back. If you turn it over to another single person, they could pivot and "ruin" the product. By turning it over to a committee, hopefully, any ruinous ideas get overruled. At least in theory
How to break up your girlfriend: "I've been thinking about the future... you're not in it.".
This seems like an extreme view to me. It's not so bad
Like you can do your hypothetical right now with a plane ticket and a 4x4 trip to the Colombian Andes. The peasant might call you a softie, but he's not gonna become Steve Pinker and tell you everything is A-OK.
Fedi is never going to be consistent, but it's also always going to be accessible to everyone. And therefore truly by the people for the people.
It's everything previous generations feared about the "boob tube" but a thousand times worse, since it's precisely personalized and backed by analysis and data that TV executives wouldn't have even dreamed of having.
Mastodon is the only social media I pay attention to, because it's the only one that doesn't constantly shovel addictive shit in my face. The fact that approximately nobody uses it, but most of the planet uses the big corporate addiction factories, is in my eyes well worth the quoted statement.
It sounds like anyone that runs a moderately sized open source project.
More money would solve most of these issues.
Our rule was that anyone who wanted to moderate “too much” was effectively not allowed to do so.
The catch being finding those who would help out and moderate effectively was not easy. And even then you were cycling through them regularly as inevitably if they cared enough they also cared enough that they stepped down.
I do wonder though if you have people doing it for the money, would that help or hinder?
Money could also be invested in developers to maintain Mastadon and issue security fixes.
It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”.
clasical liberalism is a lot more complex than what he defined, and that is the system most of us live in. Calling it capitalism is wrong, as is thinking ecconomics based on that term matters much in the real world
He literally built something that doesn't involve experts, or the state, or micromanaging anyone or anything.
Is this a new talking point you just learned about?
Why would not point out what is wrong with the current system?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Advance_of_pe...
I don’t know if Elon Musk is an example or a counter-example. Maybe both?
Taylor Swift is super popular in the demographic she plays to, while being unpopular with, say, techno or metal fans.
Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic. (And has fallen way way out of popularity with huge parts of demographics that he used to be popular in, like electric car people, home solar/battery people, and spaceflight fans.)
> As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today
Elon is a rare human being.
He is pretty much what his haters think of him (a political/social troll/child).
And he is also what his worshipers think (an incredible technical and business visionary).
Most people have trouble with dissonance. Elon is dissonance. They see a joke or a god.
A small segment clearly see both sides. I find it a painful experience. But reality isn't always bubblegum and sparkles.
You should start calling them “pro-India technologists”
If someone who had 5 dollars to their name acted like Elon Musk no one on this forum would question hating the fucker, but he’s got cash so some set of people think he might be right
OP has the problem that his product is much more well known than he is. That's probably why he is not richer. Though at least his product is a mainstream brand by now. He can get recognition by association once he does the reveal "I'm the guy who created Mastodon" this creates opportunities... Though perhaps not as big opportunities as one may think. It depends on the degree of control he has over the product. In general, with open source or other community-oriented products, the control is limited.
People and interactions between them are just messy. And that's not a thing there can be any tech solutions to.
For me, there are several clear step changes in groups based on size and there closeness of the relationships. A close circle of perhaps up to a dozen or two trustworthy friends is different to that same sized group of less trusted people. As the group size grows, it becomes less possible for the sort if "trusted" status of all group members to exist, and that fundamentally changes things. There's another step change when the group gets big enough that you can't personally know all the members. And another big step change when the group gets big enough that you can't even recognise all the members names (in my head, this is associated with a lot if the postulating about Dunbar's Number, however bad that research really was).
https://atproto.com has more of the developer mindshare now
tradeoffs are acceptable to help our social fabric to take a step in a better direction and away from corporate silos and the attention economy
Everyone who’s both email and Twitter already understands all the basic concepts.
User handles are unique in ATProto because of the domain, just like email. Not sure what the "except" part is about. Can you clarify? In ATProto, they are not "bare"
ActivityPub is the same, except they are tied to the server you join. In ATProto, they are decoupled from your data host so you can move your data and server without changing your handle. You can also change your handle without moving anything else, because handle points to a DID behind the scenes
How’s ATProto work for the 99.9% of people who don’t own domains?
For a concrete example, I tagged a Lemmy community in a Mastodon post today. Lemmy is Reddit-like and Mastodon is Twitter-like, but it displays reasonable on Lemmy using the first line of the post as a title and expanding to the attached image when clicked in the default Lemmy UI. I can also post a long-form article on Wordpress (with a plugin) and have it show up in Mastodon even though it has a short character limit by default.
Lexicon schema are not enforced, they are a tool for social coordination, and most implementations are very liberal in what they accept
https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance
> isTool: true; isRule: false; meaning: undefined
Generally the first point is server selection. That's too complicated for most users
People are capable of selecting phones, phone network providers, e-mail providers, Internet providers, but selecting a server for mastodon is too complicated?
Don't buy it
Not listening to users is when learning stops
You are making bad analogies, compare AP to other social media networks and what users expect when signing up
Boost will also do it, but it has more side effects.
Another friend tells you a super funny story. You then go and tell other friends this same funny story. (that's a boost).
Different real life things, that are captured by digital tools.
What I have a problem with are quote tweets, which are like talking about someone in front of them, without including them in the conversation.
People shouldn't be posting to get the endorphine rush from clicks or to satisfy metrics. They should post whatever they want, whenever they want. If you like what someone posts, you can follow their account, or better yet the hashtags they use. That should be sufficient.
Not having a like button seems like a good design choice TBH.
Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash and if you actually want to have some conversations you need to either look up by particular tags or comment in trending posts.
This is the entire opposite of my experience on Mastodon. I get buried in trash on Twitter, any semi-popular tweet ends up with hundreds of bots and racial slurs. I see none of that on Mastodon
Really curious how you ended up in a situation like that.
Also no matter if content was filtered or not, three different applications on iOS and Android were crashing after trying to scroll through streams - local and federated. I guess it was because of that trash overload.
It's not like I don't like mastodon, fediverse - on contrary, it's an amazing idea. I had really nice conversations there for a while - till people drop their masks.
I strongly urge you to stick to the latter.
I get nothing like what you describe, but I ensure the local/federated timeline stays out of my feed.
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