8 ms·

Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future

107 points by cpeterso 3y ago

troupe 3y ago
Just statistically speaking, based on past performance, would you be better off betting with or against Mozilla?
- mouse_ 3y ago
  It pains me greatly, but I would bet against them eleven out of ten times.
- wannacboatmovie 3y ago
  I would bet on Mozilla doing anything that doesn't involve fixing bugs in Firefox.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- CM30 3y ago
  Honestly, for this one? I'd bet slightly more optimistically than normal, simply because it's not a service/product Mozilla themselves are launching. They're merely becoming part of the Fediverse, which isn't dependent on them or their management/strategy.
- Yizahi 3y ago
  As a FF user since beta, definitely bet against them. Top brass is truly incompetent there.
russellbeattie 3y ago
> For example, Mozilla is currently experimenting with a Discover feed that aims to surface engaging content. Over time, it plans to gather more signals from around the fediverse to determine what sort of content people are interacting with. Until this is integrated into Mastodon by default - or any other new social network - its success will be limited to a niche at best. The only reason Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest have been able to retain users is because of the algorithms which surface engaging content that keeps users coming back for more. (Sadly for society, the most "engaging" is usually the most polemic or inflammatory possible, which bad actors have abused successfully with tragic results for all of us.) Let me back up this statement with simple math: If you follow 100 accounts (not a crazy amount) and they post an average of 5 times a day (some more, some less), that's 500 posts a day to process. Assuming 16 waking hours a day, that's a tweet every 2 minutes. The more people you follow, the crazier the numbers get. Over a decade ago when I still used Twitter and its API still functioned, I pulled my personal feed into a custom database, and then added my own web UI on top of it so I could try different ways of seeing all the posts from accounts I followed. I tried grouping by user, time, topic, custom ordering, filtering, formatting, etc. It turns out, it was impossible. No matter what I tried, the sheer quantity of posts means I'd miss a majority of them. At the time, I foolishly thought that this meant social media was just a fad that would soon go away - I didn't foresee the effect the discovery algorithms would have on their usage. Mastodon doesn't have this functionality by default and because of the federated nature of the service, probably won't any time soon. So people join Mastodon, use it for a while before they reach a tipping point, get overwhelmed by toots, don't feel they're getting any decent response for their own posts, don't see anything instantly engaging at the top of their feed, and then slowly stop using it.
- bachmeier 3y ago
  Everything in this post is specific to you. Some people like to go to a social media site and have an algorithm spoon-feed them garbage. I'm someone that doesn't. Mastodon is way, way better for someone like me. And judging from my Mastodon timeline, it's working well for a lot of others too. Let me suggest something crazy. Maybe a social network can exist and thrive even if there's another social network with more users.
- rsolva 3y ago
  The differences between walled garden social media and the fediverse is significant. Not all users from the algorithmically driven varieties will find a new home in the fediverse, and I guess thats OK. I have been a part of the Fediverse since 2017 and have built up a very different network of friends and interesting people and projects. The tempo is slower. I don't check the feed compulsively several times an hour as I often did with Twitter, but I do check in now and then and get occational notifications when low frequency / high quality posters put out something new. It's different and it might not suit everyone, but I like it. It's more human and I'm more in control. And no ads, just people!
  - multjoy 3y ago
    I never used the native Twitter app - my Twitter experience was solely through Tweetbot, and that was strictly a chronological timeline of posts from people I followed. Which is identical now to my mastodon experience with Ivory.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Hmm I would disagree. I used to love Facebook when I could follow my friends with it. Since they replaced the timeline with that ridiculous feed with content I never asked for, it became a real drag. I don't want to see anything I didn't specifically follow. The same way I don't want to receive spam emails. People like me are not a majority but more common than you think. The problem is, if you do what we want you can't market anything to us. That's why the platforms do this.
Ecstatify 3y ago
Digging their own grave.
- treyd 3y ago
  Care to elaborate what you mean by this? There's a lot of valid criticism of Mozilla in 2023 but what this article is talking about doesn't seem like it on the surface.
  - Ecstatify 3y ago
    Look at their website, it's just a twitter clone. How will Mozilla compete with Meta, Twitter? https://mozilla.social/public/local https://mozilla.social/public/local Content is complete garbage. Decentralisation isn't a feature for 99.9% of people.
    - kzrdude 3y ago
      It's just a mastodon instance, not something new - part of the fediverse.
      - Ecstatify 3y ago
        This is what the article is saying there’s a waitlist for and it’s also going to be moderated. So how is it going to be different than Twitter?
        kzrdude 3y ago
        I guess you didn't know about mastodon until now. I have joined there but social media isn't really for me, so I can't really speak for it: https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org I don't think it has a chance to ever be as popular as twitter, simply because they don't want to add features to make it addictive.
    - DoctorOW 3y ago
      Decentralization is a feature for the type of people who use Firefox. Mozilla's pivoting towards being a haven for the types of people who don't like their data being sold or mined.
anotherhue 3y ago
Firefox deserves better.
jmugan 3y ago
I remember in 2011 looking into decentralized social networks. I didn't see the point since existing ones worked fine. Time has proven me wrong. The existing ones now don't let me control my feed, and they keep throwing unwanted notifications at me that I can't turn off.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  Internet Identity Workshop -> Berkman Center + Berkeley 2005 :-(
- hanniabu 3y ago
  Farcaster is doing pretty well https://www.farcaster.xyz/ https://www.farcaster.xyz/
mjr00 3y ago
This is going to be another Mozilla failure. The era of big, public social media has peaked. People know better now: Big Brother is always watching, and what you post will be linked back to your real identity, maybe 10 years from now, whether you like it or not. What you post on Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, Instagram, even HN, is no longer your real, authentic self, it's an idealized self that you're marketing to someone. Decentralized/federated or centralized is irrelevant; if it's publicly accessible, it's all the same. Social media has shifted to the world of smaller communities that can't be discovered (or at least are much harder to discover) by the outside world. The younger generation are using Roblox and Fortnite as places to hang out and meet new people. The slightly less young generation has moved to Discord. I'm in Discord servers of a variety of topics (games, music, TV, programming...) and it's a world of difference how people act when they're neither trying to ragebait to harvest likes and retweets nor stepping on eggshells to avoid ruining their job prospects because an employer Googled their name. The internet is just too damn big now. We aren't in a world where there's space on the internet for people to give updates when the poop comes out anymore.[0] Making another social media site whose target audience is "the internet", both in terms of viewers and writers, is a fool's errand. [0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre
- reidjs 3y ago
  Aren’t discord and Roblox communities part of a decentralized social network???
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
    Discord is completely centralized. What they call servers aren't.
  - opan 3y ago
    AFAIK Roblox relies on a centralized server for the account system and you can't play without an account. You can't put up a Roblox server on your LAN to play with friends when the Internet is down. If Roblox servers are down, no one could play. Unlike Minecraft*, Terraria, Quake, IRC, etc. When you have a Place on Roblox it's like having a page on Geocities, where Geocities could still go down and take everyone's stuff with it. *Minecraft might need a special client to dodge the authentication issue Discord is also very much centralized, but a sibling comment already mentioned that.
INTPenis 3y ago
I am 100% behind people-driven, federated social media. But their argument is a bit strange. Because when you truly let the people decide what is politically correct to say online, we have already seen that bubbles are formed and borders are drawn. I don't know how many different fediverses there are out there, someone should do a project and try to map them. But I can tell which bubble Mozilla wants to be in. The best way to navigate the fediverse, as an instance operator, is to be completely apolitical. Even then people will hate you for not taking a stance, but I think you'll get away with a minimal amount of polarization.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  In a federated social network, the "best" way to operate an instance is to be apolitical only if you want to be apolitical. But there is no mandate to do that. The entire point of instance-based federation is that you can have "political"/biased/single-topic instances, and people that like that can chose to participate. It must be acknowledged that most people do not want to hear from the complete spectrum of viewpoints.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    >It must be acknowledged that most people do not want to hear from the complete spectrum of viewpoints. I'd phrase it differently. I'd say most people online are incapable of hearing from the complete spectrum of viewpoints. Because moving around the real world, talking to strangers for various reasons, you will end up hearing things you don't like. There is no way to de-federate from them. You just have to deal with that. And people online have a tendency to be very spoiled on this front, to want to custom tailor the human experience so there is nothing negative in it. This is a fake experience and not at all representative of humanity.
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      Let’s be honest here - the “different viewpoints” we’re talking about isn’t just differing taxation policies. I do not want - in real life or on the internet - to hear from pro-pedophilias or the pro-ana crowd. Any space that welcomes and encourages those people is not a space that I want to be in. We “defederate” in real life all the time. If a bar in town becomes known as “the nazi bar”, I won’t go there. If my favourite cafe adds a shooting range to the side, I’ll stop going there.
coldtea 3y ago
Which of Mozilla's "bets" ever remotely panned put? The only thing they got going for them, wasn't even an official bet by Mozilla, they were making the crappy bloated broswer + suite, and some community members created Firefox (then Phoenix). They should focus 100% on regaining browser market share and innovating on the browser space, instead of the numerous diversions. Of course as long as the C-team is paid handsomnly while driving Firefox to the ground, and Google pays them, they won't care.
- 542458 3y ago
  Idk, Rust seems to be working out. Thunderbird is working as well.
  - DoctorOW 3y ago
    Rust is a Linux Foundation project, and the process of adding more Rust code to Firefox is (to my knowledge) less of a priority. I love Firefox, but Mozilla enjoys shooting itself in the foot too much.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      Rust is not a Linux Foundation project. The Rust Foundation is its own foundation.
    - 542458 3y ago
      Rust was created by a Mozilla employee and sponsored by Mozilla, and Mozilla was the debatably the most significant organization-level contributor to the project from 2006 through 2020.
  - derf_ 3y ago
    If you will permit me to tout things I worked on while there, Opus seems to have been pretty successful? The final story has not yet been written on AV1, but it is still the best chance we have had for a royalty-free video format and thanks to YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, etc. now makes up a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. That ought to be enough to get it over the "ever remotely panned out" bar. I find myself using WebRTC quite a bit these days, too, so happy to have been a (small) part of that.
tqi 3y ago
"We want people to have choice and agency" I think this fundamentally misdiagnoses the root of the issue, post 2016-election. People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc), and existing social media companies are exceptionally good at figuring out how to show them more of the content they want. The problem is when it shows users content that they want but others don't want them to see, and in our current political environment there is no consensus on where the line is between being a responsible steward and censorship. Put it a different way, if Truth Social had taken off users would have had "more choice" of social networks. Would the Mozilla leadership have considered that a good outcome?
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Mozilla also put out a blogpost title "We need more than deplatforming" Seems they only care about choices when they are choices they agree with. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
  - 1shooner 3y ago
    The 'more' in that post was: - Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted. - Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact. - Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. - Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
    - brightlancer 3y ago
      > Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. Ah, yes, reinforce the status quo by diminishing or silencing the dissidents. That's never gone poorly.
      - 3y ago
james4k 3y ago
Even in decentralized networks, power concentrates to the very few. We need to figure out how to democratically own and operate our platforms (and the world, lol).
ItsABytecode 3y ago
“From a content discovery standpoint, I’m really interested in how we can seed conversations and seed experiences with really high-quality content — certainly, editorial publisher content” I’ve been waiting so long for my mastodon conversations to be seeded with high quality editorial publisher content
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Mozilla is not going to like the outcome of a decentralized social networking future, seeing as they're political ideologues in favor of censorship[1]. What they're trying to do is hop into a new fad to increase their reach. I honestly don't think most people care whether Mozilla operates a fediverse instance or not. At any rate, the future of social networking is not the fediverse, it's Nostr. ActivityPub simply has too many architectural shortcomings to be more than a novelty, in particular, you cannot guarantee that your audience receives your messages to them unless they're restricted to a subset of the network's servers. The fact that your identity is owned by a server admin is a centralizing force on the network, and different groups isolating from one another is a fragmenting force. It may be the case that such an architecture becomes standard, but it is not ideal, and seeing as it is early days with these social networking alternatives and there's already an architecurally superior option leads me to the conclusion that the fediverse will be eclipsed relatively soon. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
- sfink 3y ago
  We'll see, but I would argue that at least for most of the conversations worth having, fragmentation is good. It is of course annoying and not what anyone wants in the short term, but it's also the only thing that has been observed in practice to semi-reliably prevent a social space from going to shit. Broad reach implies the strength of any one social relationship going to zero, and you have to multiply that small value by a big number to get any value worth the effort. And we all know where that logic leads. On the other hand, people will probably do everything they can to "fix" it or work around it and broaden their reach, so it's hard to say anything about any specific technology or frontend.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  > Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken: > - Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted. > - Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact. > - Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. > - Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things. Except for the "tools to amplify factual voices", these all seem like pretty reasonable and inarguable improvements? How are these pro-censorship? If anything, calling for more transparency in promoted content is anti-censorship. Or, are we just getting hung up over a shallow interpretation of the heading?
wly_cdgr 3y ago
Who cares what Mozilla is betting on? They've never been able to break even, never mind make a profit.
- g-b-r 3y ago
  So you choose a product based on how much profit a company extracts from it, good for you
- Barrin92 3y ago
  given that the Mozilla foundation is a non-profit organisation and all revenues from Mozilla the corporation flow back into Mozilla projects that last part shouldn't come as a shock. And of course they're break even, they are not dept funded.
  - wly_cdgr 3y ago
    (e-begging and) getting funded by a dominant player that wants to maintain the illusion of meaningful competition in the market is not "breaking even", it's being a useful idiot. when has mozilla made anything that actual customers actually wanted to pay money for in large & sustained numbers?
    - Barrin92 3y ago
      never but neither has anyone else. That isn't how consumer facing internet products work. You know many browsers people pay for? Any consumers who pay for Google or Facebook? The digital economy is large companies paying each other for eyeballs while consumers want free stuff. Mozilla is no different in that regard, this is what people want. You're barking up the wrong tree if you think Mozilla is responsible for this.
g-b-r 3y ago
It's always a good time to remember that the Firefox Sync data is encrypted with the Mozilla account password, so every further usage of the Mozilla account they introduce is another chance for someone (Mozilla or law enforcement) to gain the ability of decrypting that data.
- kevincox 3y ago
  But your Firefox Account password is never sent to the server. (Although the code that does the auth does come live from the server which is a notable weakness)
  - g-b-r 3y ago
    The code that asks you the password comes from the server, and incredibly that's even for logging in to Firefox (and even many years after it's been introduced). That means that the password and key can be obtained whenever a Mozilla server wants. It's at this point impossible to believe it wasn't done like that on purpose (after pressure from someone); there's absolutely no reason to do and keep doing something like that other than to secure the ability to look at that data
- willywanker 3y ago
  The earlier version of their sync protocol, Weave, only had local encryption. If you forgot the encryption password you lost your sync data with no possibility of recovery. Pale Moon remains the only browser sticking to the older version of sync, although it doesn't have a mobile version anymore and syncing would only make sense between 2 or more PCs.
Exoristos 3y ago
[flagged]
nologic01 3y ago
Hey techcrunch, its not "consumers", its people. Lets stop this ugly, supposedly business savvy but just lazy and wrong, consumerization of humanity. On the main point, the fediverse is the future irrespective what Mozilla does but it is great news to have such an entity help accelerate developments and exploring the phase space or possibilities. Decentralized social networking is really just Web 3.0, the next phase of RSS and much more. Focusing on mastodon, the dysfunction of politics as reflected on Twitter/X etc is missing the point by a few parsecs. Wordpress now has an activitypub plugin. Any web platform that respects itself has one in the works. This is not exactly dot.com era giddiness but there is definetely a feel of a new window opening. Nevertheless mastodon is the server type that got early traction, it makes sense to benefit from the insights this is providing. The sad truth is that because adtech so thoroughly destroyed social media, we dont even know how to build a sane alternative. Moderation tech is definitely an area deserving an open and human-centered stack.
elephantshadow 3y ago
Invest in the opposite of what Mozilla is investing at and you'll be a billionaire fast.

107 points by cpeterso 3y ago

troupe 3y ago

Just statistically speaking, based on past performance, would you be better off betting with or against Mozilla?

mouse_ 3y ago
It pains me greatly, but I would bet against them eleven out of ten times.
wannacboatmovie 3y ago
I would bet on Mozilla doing anything that doesn't involve fixing bugs in Firefox.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
CM30 3y ago
Honestly, for this one? I'd bet slightly more optimistically than normal, simply because it's not a service/product Mozilla themselves are launching. They're merely becoming part of the Fediverse, which isn't dependent on them or their management/strategy.
Yizahi 3y ago
As a FF user since beta, definitely bet against them. Top brass is truly incompetent there.

russellbeattie 3y ago

> For example, Mozilla is currently experimenting with a Discover feed that aims to surface engaging content. Over time, it plans to gather more signals from around the fediverse to determine what sort of content people are interacting with. Until this is integrated into Mastodon by default - or any other new social network - its success will be limited to a niche at best. The only reason Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest have been able to retain users is because of the algorithms which surface engaging content that keeps users coming back for more. (Sadly for society, the most "engaging" is usually the most polemic or inflammatory possible, which bad actors have abused successfully with tragic results for all of us.) Let me back up this statement with simple math: If you follow 100 accounts (not a crazy amount) and they post an average of 5 times a day (some more, some less), that's 500 posts a day to process. Assuming 16 waking hours a day, that's a tweet every 2 minutes. The more people you follow, the crazier the numbers get. Over a decade ago when I still used Twitter and its API still functioned, I pulled my personal feed into a custom database, and then added my own web UI on top of it so I could try different ways of seeing all the posts from accounts I followed. I tried grouping by user, time, topic, custom ordering, filtering, formatting, etc. It turns out, it was impossible. No matter what I tried, the sheer quantity of posts means I'd miss a majority of them. At the time, I foolishly thought that this meant social media was just a fad that would soon go away - I didn't foresee the effect the discovery algorithms would have on their usage. Mastodon doesn't have this functionality by default and because of the federated nature of the service, probably won't any time soon. So people join Mastodon, use it for a while before they reach a tipping point, get overwhelmed by toots, don't feel they're getting any decent response for their own posts, don't see anything instantly engaging at the top of their feed, and then slowly stop using it.

bachmeier 3y ago
Everything in this post is specific to you. Some people like to go to a social media site and have an algorithm spoon-feed them garbage. I'm someone that doesn't. Mastodon is way, way better for someone like me. And judging from my Mastodon timeline, it's working well for a lot of others too. Let me suggest something crazy. Maybe a social network can exist and thrive even if there's another social network with more users.
rsolva 3y ago
The differences between walled garden social media and the fediverse is significant. Not all users from the algorithmically driven varieties will find a new home in the fediverse, and I guess thats OK. I have been a part of the Fediverse since 2017 and have built up a very different network of friends and interesting people and projects. The tempo is slower. I don't check the feed compulsively several times an hour as I often did with Twitter, but I do check in now and then and get occational notifications when low frequency / high quality posters put out something new. It's different and it might not suit everyone, but I like it. It's more human and I'm more in control. And no ads, just people!
- multjoy 3y ago
  I never used the native Twitter app - my Twitter experience was solely through Tweetbot, and that was strictly a chronological timeline of posts from people I followed. Which is identical now to my mastodon experience with Ivory.
wkat4242 3y ago
Hmm I would disagree. I used to love Facebook when I could follow my friends with it. Since they replaced the timeline with that ridiculous feed with content I never asked for, it became a real drag. I don't want to see anything I didn't specifically follow. The same way I don't want to receive spam emails. People like me are not a majority but more common than you think. The problem is, if you do what we want you can't market anything to us. That's why the platforms do this.

Ecstatify 3y ago

Digging their own grave.

treyd 3y ago
Care to elaborate what you mean by this? There's a lot of valid criticism of Mozilla in 2023 but what this article is talking about doesn't seem like it on the surface.
- Ecstatify 3y ago
  Look at their website, it's just a twitter clone. How will Mozilla compete with Meta, Twitter? https://mozilla.social/public/local https://mozilla.social/public/local Content is complete garbage. Decentralisation isn't a feature for 99.9% of people.
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    It's just a mastodon instance, not something new - part of the fediverse.
    - Ecstatify 3y ago
      This is what the article is saying there’s a waitlist for and it’s also going to be moderated. So how is it going to be different than Twitter?
      - kzrdude 3y ago
        I guess you didn't know about mastodon until now. I have joined there but social media isn't really for me, so I can't really speak for it: https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org I don't think it has a chance to ever be as popular as twitter, simply because they don't want to add features to make it addictive.
  - DoctorOW 3y ago
    Decentralization is a feature for the type of people who use Firefox. Mozilla's pivoting towards being a haven for the types of people who don't like their data being sold or mined.

anotherhue 3y ago

Firefox deserves better.

jmugan 3y ago

I remember in 2011 looking into decentralized social networks. I didn't see the point since existing ones worked fine. Time has proven me wrong. The existing ones now don't let me control my feed, and they keep throwing unwanted notifications at me that I can't turn off.

mistrial9 3y ago
Internet Identity Workshop -> Berkman Center + Berkeley 2005 :-(
hanniabu 3y ago
Farcaster is doing pretty well https://www.farcaster.xyz/ https://www.farcaster.xyz/

mjr00 3y ago

This is going to be another Mozilla failure. The era of big, public social media has peaked. People know better now: Big Brother is always watching, and what you post will be linked back to your real identity, maybe 10 years from now, whether you like it or not. What you post on Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, Instagram, even HN, is no longer your real, authentic self, it's an idealized self that you're marketing to someone. Decentralized/federated or centralized is irrelevant; if it's publicly accessible, it's all the same. Social media has shifted to the world of smaller communities that can't be discovered (or at least are much harder to discover) by the outside world. The younger generation are using Roblox and Fortnite as places to hang out and meet new people. The slightly less young generation has moved to Discord. I'm in Discord servers of a variety of topics (games, music, TV, programming...) and it's a world of difference how people act when they're neither trying to ragebait to harvest likes and retweets nor stepping on eggshells to avoid ruining their job prospects because an employer Googled their name. The internet is just too damn big now. We aren't in a world where there's space on the internet for people to give updates when the poop comes out anymore.[0] Making another social media site whose target audience is "the internet", both in terms of viewers and writers, is a fool's errand. [0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre

reidjs 3y ago
Aren’t discord and Roblox communities part of a decentralized social network???
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
  Discord is completely centralized. What they call servers aren't.
- opan 3y ago
  AFAIK Roblox relies on a centralized server for the account system and you can't play without an account. You can't put up a Roblox server on your LAN to play with friends when the Internet is down. If Roblox servers are down, no one could play. Unlike Minecraft*, Terraria, Quake, IRC, etc. When you have a Place on Roblox it's like having a page on Geocities, where Geocities could still go down and take everyone's stuff with it. *Minecraft might need a special client to dodge the authentication issue Discord is also very much centralized, but a sibling comment already mentioned that.

INTPenis 3y ago

I am 100% behind people-driven, federated social media. But their argument is a bit strange. Because when you truly let the people decide what is politically correct to say online, we have already seen that bubbles are formed and borders are drawn. I don't know how many different fediverses there are out there, someone should do a project and try to map them. But I can tell which bubble Mozilla wants to be in. The best way to navigate the fediverse, as an instance operator, is to be completely apolitical. Even then people will hate you for not taking a stance, but I think you'll get away with a minimal amount of polarization.

madeofpalk 3y ago
In a federated social network, the "best" way to operate an instance is to be apolitical only if you want to be apolitical. But there is no mandate to do that. The entire point of instance-based federation is that you can have "political"/biased/single-topic instances, and people that like that can chose to participate. It must be acknowledged that most people do not want to hear from the complete spectrum of viewpoints.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  >It must be acknowledged that most people do not want to hear from the complete spectrum of viewpoints. I'd phrase it differently. I'd say most people online are incapable of hearing from the complete spectrum of viewpoints. Because moving around the real world, talking to strangers for various reasons, you will end up hearing things you don't like. There is no way to de-federate from them. You just have to deal with that. And people online have a tendency to be very spoiled on this front, to want to custom tailor the human experience so there is nothing negative in it. This is a fake experience and not at all representative of humanity.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Let’s be honest here - the “different viewpoints” we’re talking about isn’t just differing taxation policies. I do not want - in real life or on the internet - to hear from pro-pedophilias or the pro-ana crowd. Any space that welcomes and encourages those people is not a space that I want to be in. We “defederate” in real life all the time. If a bar in town becomes known as “the nazi bar”, I won’t go there. If my favourite cafe adds a shooting range to the side, I’ll stop going there.

coldtea 3y ago

Which of Mozilla's "bets" ever remotely panned put? The only thing they got going for them, wasn't even an official bet by Mozilla, they were making the crappy bloated broswer + suite, and some community members created Firefox (then Phoenix). They should focus 100% on regaining browser market share and innovating on the browser space, instead of the numerous diversions. Of course as long as the C-team is paid handsomnly while driving Firefox to the ground, and Google pays them, they won't care.

542458 3y ago
Idk, Rust seems to be working out. Thunderbird is working as well.
- DoctorOW 3y ago
  Rust is a Linux Foundation project, and the process of adding more Rust code to Firefox is (to my knowledge) less of a priority. I love Firefox, but Mozilla enjoys shooting itself in the foot too much.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Rust is not a Linux Foundation project. The Rust Foundation is its own foundation.
  - 542458 3y ago
    Rust was created by a Mozilla employee and sponsored by Mozilla, and Mozilla was the debatably the most significant organization-level contributor to the project from 2006 through 2020.
- derf_ 3y ago
  If you will permit me to tout things I worked on while there, Opus seems to have been pretty successful? The final story has not yet been written on AV1, but it is still the best chance we have had for a royalty-free video format and thanks to YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, etc. now makes up a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. That ought to be enough to get it over the "ever remotely panned out" bar. I find myself using WebRTC quite a bit these days, too, so happy to have been a (small) part of that.

tqi 3y ago

"We want people to have choice and agency" I think this fundamentally misdiagnoses the root of the issue, post 2016-election. People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc), and existing social media companies are exceptionally good at figuring out how to show them more of the content they want. The problem is when it shows users content that they want but others don't want them to see, and in our current political environment there is no consensus on where the line is between being a responsible steward and censorship. Put it a different way, if Truth Social had taken off users would have had "more choice" of social networks. Would the Mozilla leadership have considered that a good outcome?

Gigachad 3y ago
Mozilla also put out a blogpost title "We need more than deplatforming" Seems they only care about choices when they are choices they agree with. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
- 1shooner 3y ago
  The 'more' in that post was: - Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted. - Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact. - Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. - Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
  - brightlancer 3y ago
    > Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. Ah, yes, reinforce the status quo by diminishing or silencing the dissidents. That's never gone poorly.
    - 3y ago

james4k 3y ago

Even in decentralized networks, power concentrates to the very few. We need to figure out how to democratically own and operate our platforms (and the world, lol).

ItsABytecode 3y ago

“From a content discovery standpoint, I’m really interested in how we can seed conversations and seed experiences with really high-quality content — certainly, editorial publisher content” I’ve been waiting so long for my mastodon conversations to be seeded with high quality editorial publisher content

friend_and_foe 3y ago

Mozilla is not going to like the outcome of a decentralized social networking future, seeing as they're political ideologues in favor of censorship[1]. What they're trying to do is hop into a new fad to increase their reach. I honestly don't think most people care whether Mozilla operates a fediverse instance or not. At any rate, the future of social networking is not the fediverse, it's Nostr. ActivityPub simply has too many architectural shortcomings to be more than a novelty, in particular, you cannot guarantee that your audience receives your messages to them unless they're restricted to a subset of the network's servers. The fact that your identity is owned by a server admin is a centralizing force on the network, and different groups isolating from one another is a fragmenting force. It may be the case that such an architecture becomes standard, but it is not ideal, and seeing as it is early days with these social networking alternatives and there's already an architecurally superior option leads me to the conclusion that the fediverse will be eclipsed relatively soon. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

sfink 3y ago
We'll see, but I would argue that at least for most of the conversations worth having, fragmentation is good. It is of course annoying and not what anyone wants in the short term, but it's also the only thing that has been observed in practice to semi-reliably prevent a social space from going to shit. Broad reach implies the strength of any one social relationship going to zero, and you have to multiply that small value by a big number to get any value worth the effort. And we all know where that logic leads. On the other hand, people will probably do everything they can to "fix" it or work around it and broaden their reach, so it's hard to say anything about any specific technology or frontend.
madeofpalk 3y ago
> Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken: > - Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted. > - Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact. > - Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. > - Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things. Except for the "tools to amplify factual voices", these all seem like pretty reasonable and inarguable improvements? How are these pro-censorship? If anything, calling for more transparency in promoted content is anti-censorship. Or, are we just getting hung up over a shallow interpretation of the heading?

wly_cdgr 3y ago

Who cares what Mozilla is betting on? They've never been able to break even, never mind make a profit.

g-b-r 3y ago
So you choose a product based on how much profit a company extracts from it, good for you
Barrin92 3y ago
given that the Mozilla foundation is a non-profit organisation and all revenues from Mozilla the corporation flow back into Mozilla projects that last part shouldn't come as a shock. And of course they're break even, they are not dept funded.
- wly_cdgr 3y ago
  (e-begging and) getting funded by a dominant player that wants to maintain the illusion of meaningful competition in the market is not "breaking even", it's being a useful idiot. when has mozilla made anything that actual customers actually wanted to pay money for in large & sustained numbers?
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    never but neither has anyone else. That isn't how consumer facing internet products work. You know many browsers people pay for? Any consumers who pay for Google or Facebook? The digital economy is large companies paying each other for eyeballs while consumers want free stuff. Mozilla is no different in that regard, this is what people want. You're barking up the wrong tree if you think Mozilla is responsible for this.

g-b-r 3y ago

It's always a good time to remember that the Firefox Sync data is encrypted with the Mozilla account password, so every further usage of the Mozilla account they introduce is another chance for someone (Mozilla or law enforcement) to gain the ability of decrypting that data.

kevincox 3y ago
But your Firefox Account password is never sent to the server. (Although the code that does the auth does come live from the server which is a notable weakness)
- g-b-r 3y ago
  The code that asks you the password comes from the server, and incredibly that's even for logging in to Firefox (and even many years after it's been introduced). That means that the password and key can be obtained whenever a Mozilla server wants. It's at this point impossible to believe it wasn't done like that on purpose (after pressure from someone); there's absolutely no reason to do and keep doing something like that other than to secure the ability to look at that data
willywanker 3y ago
The earlier version of their sync protocol, Weave, only had local encryption. If you forgot the encryption password you lost your sync data with no possibility of recovery. Pale Moon remains the only browser sticking to the older version of sync, although it doesn't have a mobile version anymore and syncing would only make sense between 2 or more PCs.

Exoristos 3y ago

[flagged]

nologic01 3y ago

Hey techcrunch, its not "consumers", its people. Lets stop this ugly, supposedly business savvy but just lazy and wrong, consumerization of humanity. On the main point, the fediverse is the future irrespective what Mozilla does but it is great news to have such an entity help accelerate developments and exploring the phase space or possibilities. Decentralized social networking is really just Web 3.0, the next phase of RSS and much more. Focusing on mastodon, the dysfunction of politics as reflected on Twitter/X etc is missing the point by a few parsecs. Wordpress now has an activitypub plugin. Any web platform that respects itself has one in the works. This is not exactly dot.com era giddiness but there is definetely a feel of a new window opening. Nevertheless mastodon is the server type that got early traction, it makes sense to benefit from the insights this is providing. The sad truth is that because adtech so thoroughly destroyed social media, we dont even know how to build a sane alternative. Moderation tech is definitely an area deserving an open and human-centered stack.

elephantshadow 3y ago

Invest in the opposite of what Mozilla is investing at and you'll be a billionaire fast.