Eugen Rochko is the CEO of Mastodon — the open-source decentralized competitor to Twitter. It’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in our post-Elon Musk era.
The idea of Mastodon is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls. You join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email, and you’ll get it. If you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.
Now, if you are like me, you hear the words “open source” and “decentralized” and then the word “CEO” and think, wait, why does the decentralized open standard have a CEO? The whole point is that no single person or company is in charge, right? Well, welcome to the wild world of open-source governance. It’s a riot, my friends. You’re going to hear me and Eugen say the phrase “benevolent dictator for life” in dead seriousness because that’s how a lot of these projects are run.
Of course, we also talk about money and structure. Mastodon doesn’t make a lot of money, and Eugen is figuring out how to build a structure that scales past just a handful of people. This tiny and mostly volunteer labor of love might very well be the future of social networking and, if you believe the hype about ActivityPub, might have some part in the future of the web. That’s pretty exciting, even if things seem a little messy in the moment.