Mastodon founder has turned down several investments in recent months

Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon, has received more than five offers from US investors in recent months wanting to invest in the platform. Rochko has declined these offers, stating that he wants to maintain a non-profit structure.

The man did his story to the British newspaper Financial Times and says that the American investors had “hundreds of thousands” of dollars to invest in Mastodon. Rochko says he has not taken up these offers, saying the non-profit structure of the organization behind Mastodon is “untouchable”. Mastodon is not going down the same path as Twitter. Rochko also emphasized that Mastodon uses a very different model than Twitter. “Twitter can be sold to a billionaire, taken offline and go bankrupt.”

However, Rochko is not entirely against investors. This is evident from previous reports in which the founder had announced that he wants to hold talks with investors regarding the offering of Mastodon hosting packages for a fee. In that case, the service would remain free for users and for hosters who arrange their own hosting. Rochko would like to emulate Mozilla, the company behind the free Firefox open source web browser. Mozilla earns money by offering additional services such as a VPN service. Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has become more popular this year since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter came out. Mastodon works on the basis of ActivityPub. At the end of December it was announced that Mastodon has more than 2.5 million active users.