The founder of Mastodon has said he has rejected approaches from more than five US based investors, as the Twitter rival grows in popularity after Musk’s chaotic debut as a social media owner.
Eugen Rochko, who launched the open source social network in 2016, told the Financial Times he had received the offers from Silicon Valley firms to put “hundreds of thousands of dollars” into the product.
The popularity of Mastodon has surged since the $44bn acquisition of Twitter by Musk in October. Rochko said last week that Mastodon had jumped from 300,000 monthly active users to 2.5 million after the Twitter deal, which has seen Musk reinstate banned accounts such as Trump’s and temporarily suspend journalists at publications including the New York Times and Washington Post.
His platform’s status as a non-profit organisation was untouchable and its independence was part of its appeal to users. Mastodon has more than 9,200 patrons on Patreon, the online membership service, who are contributing more than £28,000 a month to the platform between them.
“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,”
“This is a stark reminder that centralised platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say … At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn’t have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public.”
In a blog post, Rochko wrote.
