\n<\/p>\n
Mammoth, a recently launched Mastodon app<\/a> that\u2019s trying to make it easier on users who want to join the decentralized social web, has a notable financial backer. The company confirmed<\/a> that its leading pre-seed investor is Mozilla, a proponent of the open web, who invested in the company\u2019s first general round alongside others, including Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce\u2019s Marc Benioff.<\/p>\n The company has a unique founding story as well. The app was originally built by iOS developer Shihab Mehboob, the creator behind a number of apps including the whimsical music app Vinyls<\/a> and the Twitter client Aviary 2<\/a>. The latter was impacted by Elon Musk\u2019s Twitter API changes which put an end to third-party Twitter clients<\/a>, prompting Mehboob to turn his attention to the decentralized and open source Twitter alternative Mastodon.<\/p>\n Mammoth was the result of those efforts, but it has since been acquired by the company that\u2019s now running the project, led by principal developer Bart Decrem.<\/a><\/p>\n Now, the team at Mammoth is just three full-time employees and a handful of contractors. And while the total investment round is undisclosed, Decrem characterized the pre-seed as a small amount \u2014 \u201ca million or two is the general round\u201d at this stage, he says.<\/p>\n The new Mammoth founder\u2019s background is both in open source and consumer apps, in addition to entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n In \u201999, Decrem worked on a Linux startup called Eazel which aimed to make Linux easier to use. While others on that project later ended up building Safari and other technology at Apple, Decrem found himself at the Mozilla Foundation ahead of the Firefox 1.0 launch. There, he ran marketing and business affairs and worked on branding and the international launch. He was also a part of the search monetization discussions, including the initial<\/a> Google search deal.<\/p>\n He later went on to more entrepreneurial efforts including the VC-backed social web browser Flock (which received its fair share of TechCrunch coverage<\/a> back in the day), followed by an early smartphone game maker Tapulous, makers of Tap Tap Revenge. The latter landed him at Disney following an acquisition, as the head of the mobile games group, which put out products like the \u201cWhere\u2019s My Water\u201d series and some \u201cTemple Run\u201d titles.<\/p>\n Some of these prior efforts had also involved the same approach of finding and partnering with existing developers, Decrem notes, including the original Tap Tap Revenge developer. Later at Disney, he found a developer in QA who had built a No. 1 game on the App Store, but not under Disney\u2019s branding. Decrem brought the developer into his group and gave him the space to create what became \u201cWhere\u2019s My Water?,\u201d a title that\u2019s seen a billion-some downloads by now.<\/p>\n \u201cThe way I like to do things is you find somebody special and then get out the way and support their vision,\u201d Decrem explains. \u201cI saw that spark in [Mammoth founder] Shihab [Mehboob], and that\u2019s why we\u2019re working together.\u201d<\/p>\n The two were teamed up as Decrem was running a small lab<\/a> that had been working on decentralization projects, including a crypto app called KyrptoSign<\/a>, for legal documents on the blockchain, as well as an art collective<\/a>. But when Mastodon came along, the team pivoted, acquired Mammoth and now it\u2019s the group\u2019s only focus.<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong> Mammoth<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For Decrem, the appeal of Mastodon was not just that it\u2019s an open source Twitter clone \u2014 something he said only felt \u201cmildly interesting\u201d \u2014 but how it was a place where communities were forming.<\/p>\n \u201cIt reminded me of Firefox 0.7, which is what I got involved in Mozilla \u2014 the Firefox launch,\u201d Decrem says. \u201cI was like, there\u2019s just people nerding out here, doing cool shit\u2026that feels exciting and interesting and everything I like about the internet \u2014 communities building and organizing themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis thing is half microblogging, but half people organizing communities \u2014 like Reddit, or maybe like Discord,\u201d he continues. \u201cThis is like a digitally native social system. And it\u2019s decentralized. That\u2019s freaking cool.\u201d<\/p>\n Other companies seem to think it\u2019s cool too. Today, Flipboard announced it was joining the decentralized social web<\/a>. Medium already has<\/a>, and Tumblr said it would<\/a>.<\/p>\n