Mastodon Creator Discusses Explosive Growth and Anti-Twitter Vision
Eugen Rochko reveals how recent Twitter chaos drives millions to his decentralized social network while he plans to slowly expand his tiny team.
Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko builds a decentralized alternative to Twitter that currently boasts 2.5 million monthly active users across 8,600 servers. He develops this open-source network with a philosophy that directly opposes typical growth-hacking strategies, as he focuses on the technology rather than treating audience or revenue as an end in itself.
Recent turbulence at Twitter under Elon Musk triggers massive surges in Mastodon's user base, with daily mobile app downloads now settling around 4,000 per day across iOS and Android. The platform sees peak spikes of hundreds of thousands of downloads when major Twitter news breaks, bringing the total iOS downloads to 1.8 million over the last 90 days and expanding the Android installed base from 53,000 to over 900,000 devices.
Despite this massive scale, Rochko operates Mastodon with a remarkably small team, serving as the only full-time employee alongside five contractors. He actively works on job listings to expand the permanent staff, though he admits the hiring process moves slowly as he navigates this new frontier for his company.