4 ms·

Side note. From Andreas's post: > looks like the site requires a login now. It used to be available publicly for years and was public until a few days ago I'

Side note. From Andreas's post: > looks like the site requires a login now. It used to be available publicly for years and was public until a few days ago I'm no longer a Mozillian, but stuff like this is really, really weird. I'm referring in general to things being hidden or locked up—Mozilla as an organization operated more openly than anything else I can think of, which is part of what used to make it so beautiful (and successful)—but specifically, I'm talking about sign ins. I stopped touching stuff on developer.mozilla.org 5+ years ago (or even consulting it, really), but I was reading some docs on the site last week and saw something that was so outright wrong that I felt it had to be fixed. I tried to, and it turns out that you have to use GitHub to sign in. The idea of requiring a social media sign in for a Mozilla web property is one of the most un-Mozilla things possible and really blew me away.

coldpie 9y ago
GitHub isn't social media, dude.
- 0x006A 9y ago
  GitHub Is The Next Big Social Network, Powered By What You Do, Not Who You Know https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/15/github-is-the-next-big-social-network-powered-by-what-you-do-not-who-you-know/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/15/github...
- Endy 9y ago
  Then what else is it? There's a strong focus on community building (i.e. push/pull requests) (social), and those people create the bulk of the site's content (media), which in turn draws in outside users and encourages them to sign up and through a combination of sharing content (i.e. forks/clones) and new content (i.e. new projects). Of course it's social media. The difference is literally only in terms of what the media in question is.
dao- 9y ago
https://www.arewestableyet.com/ https://www.arewestableyet.com/ is for internal tracking and rather hard to make sense of externally. It's cluttered with jargon and abbreviations and raw numbers. (I can tell because I just logged in. I work for Mozilla.) For example, this is how the rows are labeled in one table: usage_khours, Main (M), M + Content (M+C), C - Content Shutdown (C-S), M + C - S, NPAPI + GMP Plugin Crashes (P), GPU. It's easy to see how exposing this site to the world might not be a good idea, especially when it's referenced from a blog post appearing on the hacker news front page and people start drawing all kinds of uninformed conclusions.
- the8472 9y ago
  Locking out people because they might be confused by data seems... quite patronizing. I'm not saying I am entitled to mozilla's data, but if that were the reason behind closing data that was once open I would feel a little insulted. Lack of openness also makes participation more difficult. For example I occasionally see links by mozilla developers posted on IRC (some telemetry, google spreadsheets) that require login, which makes it more difficult to follow what's going on.
  - dao- 9y ago
    Dunno, can you make sense of the jargon I pasted? This site really isn't useful to the outside and probably shouldn't have been public in the first place. It would _never_ have been public at Apple or Microsoft or Google. But Mozilla is open by default, so people often don't think twice before making something public. Also, (unpaid) Mozilla contributors do get access to this stuff.
    - the8472 9y ago
      > Dunno, can you make sense of the jargon I pasted? yes, the crash stats site shows similar categories
- glandium 9y ago
  One could argue that if it's for internal tracking, it doesn't need its own domain name.
Hasknewbie 9y ago
Interestingly there is a pretty salty comment bellow his post addressing this and complaining that he is publishing/commenting publicly available data. The "how dare you publish facts! The Mozilla Politburo does not approve of this!" tone is so stereotypical of zealots I initially thought it was a sarcastic comment.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Seems like a long term project contributor, if the nickname is for real. I wonder why it is that i seem to bump into an upsurge of near religious FOSS devs from Europe these days...

coldpie 9y ago

GitHub isn't social media, dude.

0x006A 9y ago
GitHub Is The Next Big Social Network, Powered By What You Do, Not Who You Know https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/15/github-is-the-next-big-social-network-powered-by-what-you-do-not-who-you-know/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/15/github...
Endy 9y ago
Then what else is it? There's a strong focus on community building (i.e. push/pull requests) (social), and those people create the bulk of the site's content (media), which in turn draws in outside users and encourages them to sign up and through a combination of sharing content (i.e. forks/clones) and new content (i.e. new projects). Of course it's social media. The difference is literally only in terms of what the media in question is.

dao- 9y ago

https://www.arewestableyet.com/ https://www.arewestableyet.com/ is for internal tracking and rather hard to make sense of externally. It's cluttered with jargon and abbreviations and raw numbers. (I can tell because I just logged in. I work for Mozilla.) For example, this is how the rows are labeled in one table: usage_khours, Main (M), M + Content (M+C), C - Content Shutdown (C-S), M + C - S, NPAPI + GMP Plugin Crashes (P), GPU. It's easy to see how exposing this site to the world might not be a good idea, especially when it's referenced from a blog post appearing on the hacker news front page and people start drawing all kinds of uninformed conclusions.

the8472 9y ago
Locking out people because they might be confused by data seems... quite patronizing. I'm not saying I am entitled to mozilla's data, but if that were the reason behind closing data that was once open I would feel a little insulted. Lack of openness also makes participation more difficult. For example I occasionally see links by mozilla developers posted on IRC (some telemetry, google spreadsheets) that require login, which makes it more difficult to follow what's going on.
- dao- 9y ago
  Dunno, can you make sense of the jargon I pasted? This site really isn't useful to the outside and probably shouldn't have been public in the first place. It would _never_ have been public at Apple or Microsoft or Google. But Mozilla is open by default, so people often don't think twice before making something public. Also, (unpaid) Mozilla contributors do get access to this stuff.
  - the8472 9y ago
    > Dunno, can you make sense of the jargon I pasted? yes, the crash stats site shows similar categories
glandium 9y ago
One could argue that if it's for internal tracking, it doesn't need its own domain name.

Hasknewbie 9y ago

Interestingly there is a pretty salty comment bellow his post addressing this and complaining that he is publishing/commenting publicly available data. The "how dare you publish facts! The Mozilla Politburo does not approve of this!" tone is so stereotypical of zealots I initially thought it was a sarcastic comment.

digi_owl 9y ago
Seems like a long term project contributor, if the nickname is for real. I wonder why it is that i seem to bump into an upsurge of near religious FOSS devs from Europe these days...