Dec 27, 2022 06:00:00

Interview with Mastodon founder Eugen Lotschko, How is Mastodon growing in the outflow of users from Twitter?

While Twitter is undergoing major reforms under Elon Musk, who became CEO in October 2022, the decentralized social network ``

Mastodon '' has greatly increased the number of users. TechCrunch, an IT news site, interviewed Mr. Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon.

How Mastodon is scaling amid the Twitter exodus | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/23/how-mastodon-is-scaling-amid-the-twitter-exodus/

According to Rochico, Mastodon's creator and Mastodon's only full-time employee, Mastodon has more than 8,600 servers and a total of 2.5 million monthly active users at the time of writing. Some of the servers are directly operated by Mastodon, the largest of which, mastodon.social, currently has 881,000 registered users, of which 210,000 are active.

However, Rochiko has temporarily stopped new registrations for mastodon.social, saying, ``There are other places where you can register an account and interact with the world of Mastodon.''

Given the surge in Mastodon users, it seems like a lack of manpower to keep mastodon. About.

“The main reason the registration is closed is because scaling beyond the number of users you have now is a huge burden for

DevOps . I don't want to say 'it's not good enough', that's not the real reason, it's that we don't have a dedicated DevOps employee right now. It's easier to close registrations and ensure quality for existing users than to increase the number of people, and I fix things overnight.'

``The decentralized nature of Mastodon and the fact that there are many other servers that can be registered means that suspending new registrations is a kind of ``decision without victims'', said Rochko. talking

Mastodon was originally established as a non-profit organization, and so far funding has been funded by $ 31,000 (about 4.1 million yen) monthly sent to Mr. Rochico's

Patreon account. Lochko's financial aid has surged from $7,000 (930,000 yen) over the past month.

Mr. Rochiko plans to keep Mastodon as non-profit in the future, but he is also exploring a plan to commercialize a part as a 'split model'. Regarding this initiative, Mr. Lochko said, ``Like Mozilla, while working on the core product as an open source project or a non-profit organization, as a for-profit side business, we may start a SaaS that provides Mastodon hosting to those who want it. I can't,' he said.

With this service, Mastodon will only host, and the server will be under the customer's control. We are also looking into allowing users to migrate their data to other hosting providers and vice versa in the future.

Advertisements are available to customers if they choose to do so, but Mastodon has no plans to incorporate advertisements into their hosting services. Rochko said, ``Anyone can develop another platform with different functions using completely different software while using the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon uses. It would be possible to incorporate advertisements,” he points out.

On top of that, Mr. Lochko said, ``The only question is whether the service will be a service that tracks user interests and location information to make advertising effective. I'm not interested in implementing ads in the code, but again, Mastodon is free, open source, and anyone can tweak it, so they do so at their own risk. We will develop advertising with a different business model.'

Mr. Rochiko has several offers from investors, but many investors do not understand Mr. Rochico's vision and only talk about Mastodon's commercialization. 'Over the past few weeks, I've tried to talk to some VCs about their hosting business, but they're somehow only interested in taking a niche on Mastodon's main product, and they don't want a sustainable hosting business. are not very interested, but we're not going to put them in the main product, so there's not going to be any venture capital out there, so either angel investors or crowdfunding , or whether personal funds will suffice, I don't know for now,' commented Rochko.

At the time of writing, Mastodon has one employee, Mr. Rochiko, but there are five freelance staff working as moderators. We also have Felix Hlatky, who is in charge of finance, although he hasn't officially been named CFO yet.

However, the monthly income of $ 31,000 from Patreon is not enough to feed the staff, and it is also unstable. Regarding the future structure of Mastodon, Mr. Rochiko said, ``At the moment, I am the only full-time employee, and the remaining five are contract employees. It's taking time. It's a new frontier for a company that has been working alone for six years. Until now, I could do it alone, but from now on, more people will be needed.'