Eugen Rochko is CEO of Mastodon gGmbH which is the company which develops the Mastodon software. It isn’t the software itself; that’s open source and could be forked and developed by anyone. Nor is it any of the instances which can be operated by anyone who wants to and they don’t even have to use Mastodon’s code to do so.

I could set up a company to run an instance and call myself CEO if I wanted, it would only mean something to users on my instance, I guess.

The overlapping names are, probably unintentionally, slightly confusing.

I’m old enough to remember when Facebook Messenger was compatible with XMPP (as was Google Hangouts, then called Talk). You could talk to people on there from your own server, you could use whatever open source client you wanted. It was great.

Then they cut off the federation. Then they cut off the API.

They’ll do the same again. Once enough of your friends and family are on their network they cut of federation and you have to move to them if you don’t want to get cut off with it.