Mastodon rejects funding offers and wants to maintain its non-profit status

Mastodon is riding the wave of chaos on its rival Twitter, gaining thousands of users since its acquisition by Elon Musk. But it does not intend to take the opportunity to become a for-profit business.

The creator of the platform, German developer Eugen Rochko, said in a recent interview that Mastodon rejected more than five investment proposals of venture capitalists in recent months. He said he turned down those offers in an effort to "preserve the unique non-profit status of the social media platform."

Mastodont has gained hundreds of thousands of new subscribers between November and December, and more so since the start of the Twitter/Musk saga.

During a recent interview with Financial Times, Rochko said the influx of new users has piqued the interest of venture capitalists.. He said he has received offers from at least five US-based venture capitalists to invest "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in support of the product. However, Rochko rejected the various proposals, saying Mastodon's status as a nonprofit is "untouchable."

According to him, the independence of Mastodon and the choice of moderation styles on your servers they were part of his appeal.

“Mastodon will not morph into whatever you hate about Twitter. The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, that it can be closed, bankrupt, etc. It's the paradigm difference [between the platforms],” Rochko said. According to him, a multitude of reasons make Mastodon attractive, including the fact that it is run by a non-profit organization, has no advertising infrastructure, built-in monetization, or algorithm.

Mastodon is a decentralized social network made up of independent servers organized around specific themes, topics, or interests. People can join servers, follow each other, participate in conversations, and do all sorts of things they expect to do on a social network like Twitter. The platform has been around since March 2016, but it didn't really take off until late 2022, after Musk bought Twitter for a whopping $44 billion. Mastodon has enjoyed a massive influx of new users in the past two months, many of whom have left the rival platform.

Mastodon is open source and Mastodon's founding structure is registered by its founder as a non-profit organization in Germany, under the name "Mastodon gGmbH", in August 2021.

“Mastodon is free and open source. There are no ads, it respects your privacy and allows people/communities to govern themselves. It's because at Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that no billionaire can buy and own, and we strive to create a more resilient global platform without the incentive of profit.

According to reports, Mastodon relies primarily on donations to fund its platform.. For example, he raises around $25 a month through Patreon from over 000 regular donors.

Between October and November, the platform's monthly active user base grew from 300.000 to more than 2,5 million, while Mastodon's daily app downloads skyrocketed from 6.000 on October 27, the day Musk acquired Twitter. Mastodon rose to 243.000 on November 18. Also, it should be noted that Mastodon is not the only rival to Twitter that benefits from the chaos that Musk has created within the company.

Services like Tumblr have also seen a huge influx of new users.. Rochko is the sole shareholder of Mastodon and pays himself a salary of just 3100 euros ($3290) a month. Despite his relatively low income, at least compared to the founders and executives of other social media platforms, Rochko does not lack ambition.

He told the Financial Times that his long-term goal is for

Mastodon replaces Twitter as the world's leading microblogging platform. "The road is long, but at the same time it is bigger than ever," he said.