7 ms·

Mozilla exits the Fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December

159 points by rglullis 2y ago

rglullis 2y ago
The writing was on the wall anyway. With the news of the political struggles between Steve Teixeira (who was pushing for deeper integration with open social web) and Laura Chambers (who seems more interested in keeping Google happy to receive the fat checks) it was clear that the whole "Let's open an instance and call an experiment with new social media" was just a way to pretend they were doing anything in the space while not hurting any of Big Tech's feelings. Back in May I wrote a series of blog posts about mozilla.social, ActivityPub and what I thought could be done instead. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40428098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40428098)
- stefan_ 2y ago
  > [Steve Teixeira] began a new effort to explore Moz Social, an ethical social media product. I don't understand.. was this "Moz Social"? What is "Moz Social"? Google believes its the forums of some SEO bullshit company. Did the "Open Social Web" have 300 users? God knows they did that guy dirty, but the executives at Mozilla really are a hopeless bunch.
rvz 2y ago
Mozilla gave plenty of time for this instance to do something spectacular but perhaps, this experiment never made sense in the first place. > Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users as of the time of Tuesday’s announcement. There is just no financial benefit for Mozilla in spinning up a Mastodon instance only to be used by what <300 active users? > By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users. That's Threads remember? They are now part of the 'fediverse' and interoperate with Mastodon with over ~180M+ monthly active users which is >150x bigger than the monthly active users of the entire fediverse! We already have the results after witnessing a live experiment [0] when Brazil banned Twitter / X and with lots of alternatives to sign up to; the majority of Brazilians signed up to either Bluesky or Threads. Maybe Mozilla looked at an actual migration from X to BlueSky or Threads and realized that there was really no point in running a Mastodon instance when Threads was the biggest one. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408985
- rglullis 2y ago
  Threads is not fully open. If they looked at Threads and thought "that's a lot of people", then it would be *one more* reason to have their own instance. But anyway, I do agree that having their own instance is kind of pointless. We need to get rid of "servers" and get back to an Open Social Web. I wrote in May what I thought would be a smarter approach for them (https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi-more-webby/ https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi...). Instead of yet-another mastodon server, they would be better off if they started building something like https://browser.pub https://browser.pub inside of Firefox.
- CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
  > There is just no financial benefit for Mozilla in spinning up a Mastodon instance only to be used by what <300 active users? Was the instance every actually open to the public? Seems to have been invite-only for the entire duration.
  - jeromegv 2y ago
    Yeah that’s the biggest issue. I remember when it launched and it was invite only. If they indeed opened the registration at some point nobody knew about it. So they really failed at promoting whatever they were trying to do.
- Vinnl 2y ago
  Only a subset of Threads users are currently exposed to the Fediverse, and I believe only partially (not sure if replies have been enabled yet, and if they are, if they're visible as regular replies, or under a separate heading?). I'd also note that social media use differs hugely per country. See, for example, WhatsApp vs iMessage use in the US and outside, or how Brazil used to be big on Orkut. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from Brazilian usage patterns vs the rest of the world.
- winwang 2y ago
  I think the vast majority of users just want a good experience. UI fluidity, timeliness of notifications, DMs, image/video quality, etc. Decentralization is near the last of their concerns.
soupbowl 2y ago
[flagged]
maelito 2y ago
Maybe they realized Mastodon has no real migration from one instance to another, ant that it's been a criticized limitation since 2019. Edit : people answering my message probably think as I did that Mastodon enables messages migration (your posts), but no. The "fediverse" doesn't allow you to migrate your posts with your profile migration. It's like keeping your android contacts but losing all your photos. Well more precisely, they're on this old hard drive, you can't show them to your friends and the hard drive can disappear anytime. 2019 issue with 500 likes, core team doesn't care much. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
- api 2y ago
  IMHO this is an absolutely fatal design flaw. It means that if it were to become very popular eventually the largest instances would take over the network due to network effects. ActivityPub has eventual centralization baked in. Nostr is closer to a real decentralized social network, though it has other problems. Chief among these is trying to be Twitter, which has always been a model of interaction that lends itself to obnoxiousness. This was also a problem with Mastodon. If we're trying to do better, we should not be trying to duplicate a toxic environment. Still Nostr is architecturally superior.
  - ptero 2y ago
    Can you expand on the Nostr problems? Honest question. I mostly see it trying to offer another (architecturally better and robust to censorship) mechanism for group communication. I think (hope, TBH) that Nostr can fill the niche of the Usenet of the past where some groups did slide into obnoxiousness but others maintained intelligent and thoughtful discussions for many years. My 2c.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      I always liked the reddit post-scarcity solution to this -- make it as easy as possible to fork / start a new community. Users will vote with their feet. What was required to start a new usenet domain? (a bit before my time)
LeoPanthera 2y ago
Can we fork Mozilla? The browser can become a community product again? Where's Jamie Zawinski when you need him. It's time for a rewrite of the about:mozilla screen.
- BadHumans 2y ago
  Everyone whines when Mozilla does anything that isn't related to Firefox and I don't understand it. I use Firefox daily and I run into maybe 1 bug every 6 months which is much fewer than when I as running Chrome. What exactly do you want them to pour more resources into?
  - dpkirchner 2y ago
    I think an alternative to Electron that makes it easier to write efficient desktop applications using web technologies would be welcome. Basically, figure out why so many Electron apps end up slow and laggy and make first-party code that does those tasks better (and in Rust, for nerd cred.) Edit to add: although I guess this would be related to Firefox. Oh well!
    - gnuly 2y ago
      something like [tauri](https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri)?
      - dpkirchner 2y ago
        Yah, seems like it
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Dev tools have fallen way behind Chrome's. I'm the only one on my team who never switches to Chrome for debugging work, and when web developers switch en masse to Chrome for testing their code that hurts the diversity of the ecosystem. The sad thing is that dev tools used to be Firefox's standout feature, but it seems that Google got that memo and Mozilla forgot it.
Sarkie 2y ago
Social without social
FirstLvR 2y ago
Fediverse, sadly, goes against the full experience we requiere The objective is desc network but also want a single place for all our stuff, topics, news, etc Same reason why Reddit haven’t been replaced yet :/
- FMecha 2y ago
  This is what traditional forums excel at - for instance, a niche-specific forum may also contain off-topic boards for topics unrelated to the niche, such as general current affairs or media. wrt to Reddit, I mean, Lemmy does exist, but much like Mastodon instances try to be "another Twitter", Lemmy (instances) also tries to be "another Reddit". At the end of the day, it's a human/userbase problem of "platforms change, hivemind doesn't".
superkuh 2y ago
Mozilla slowly retreating from open federated protocols. They dropped off IRC a few years back, now off fediverse. When can we expect them to close the matrix server and start using Slack corporation?
sub7 2y ago
Here's a fun exercise - capture all the traffic Firefox sends to mozilla.com/org and mozgcp.net etc It's a shocking amount of telemetry, combined with dark patterns to reset settings on every update. Then you go to their website and see that "safe and private" is part of the headline sales pitch. Absolutely disgraceful.
chris_wot 2y ago
Every new initiative at Mozilla eventually gets shutdown. Seriously, they are worse than Google.
meiraleal 2y ago
It is funny how we (firefox users) take Mozilla's fails so personal. That something that became very common now tho. Mozilla is incapable of creating anything relevant in its current format, unfortunately. Soon, they won't have even a userbase to try these failed experiments.
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
But I thought fediverse, threads, bluesky, my favorite political Oni, etc were all going to kill Twitter dead in weeks. Turns out Network Effects are a pain pain in the ass if you don’t have them, but also none of those ever had a chance to kill twitter.
krick 2y ago
It's seems clumsy. I wouldn't really cheer for them opening this Mastodon server or whatever, because, really, all that Mozilla is expected to do is to advance Firefox. But since they did, what's the point of shutting it down? It upsets some people, because "once again Mozilla turns its back at free and wonderful stuff", and I'd imagine running a Mastodon server must be virtually free, isn't it?
butz 2y ago
Mozilla should focus on building a web browser, and stop dipping into side projects. And by saying "building web browser" I do not mean "adding ads and AI into Firefox". We need an embeddable and reusable browser engine, which could be easily wrapped in UI and features, depending on what user actually requires for their task - "customizability" is a long forgotten word nowadays.

159 points by rglullis 2y ago

The writing was on the wall anyway. With the news of the political struggles between Steve Teixeira (who was pushing for deeper integration with open social web) and Laura Chambers (who seems more interested in keeping Google happy to receive the fat checks) it was clear that the whole "Let's open an instance and call an experiment with new social media" was just a way to pretend they were doing anything in the space while not hurting any of Big Tech's feelings. Back in May I wrote a series of blog posts about mozilla.social, ActivityPub and what I thought could be done instead. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40428098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40428098)

stefan_ 2y ago
> [Steve Teixeira] began a new effort to explore Moz Social, an ethical social media product. I don't understand.. was this "Moz Social"? What is "Moz Social"? Google believes its the forums of some SEO bullshit company. Did the "Open Social Web" have 300 users? God knows they did that guy dirty, but the executives at Mozilla really are a hopeless bunch.

rvz 2y ago

Mozilla gave plenty of time for this instance to do something spectacular but perhaps, this experiment never made sense in the first place. > Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users as of the time of Tuesday’s announcement. There is just no financial benefit for Mozilla in spinning up a Mastodon instance only to be used by what <300 active users? > By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users. That's Threads remember? They are now part of the 'fediverse' and interoperate with Mastodon with over ~180M+ monthly active users which is >150x bigger than the monthly active users of the entire fediverse! We already have the results after witnessing a live experiment [0] when Brazil banned Twitter / X and with lots of alternatives to sign up to; the majority of Brazilians signed up to either Bluesky or Threads. Maybe Mozilla looked at an actual migration from X to BlueSky or Threads and realized that there was really no point in running a Mastodon instance when Threads was the biggest one. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408985

rglullis 2y ago
Threads is not fully open. If they looked at Threads and thought "that's a lot of people", then it would be *one more* reason to have their own instance. But anyway, I do agree that having their own instance is kind of pointless. We need to get rid of "servers" and get back to an Open Social Web. I wrote in May what I thought would be a smarter approach for them (https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi-more-webby/ https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi...). Instead of yet-another mastodon server, they would be better off if they started building something like https://browser.pub https://browser.pub inside of Firefox.
CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
> There is just no financial benefit for Mozilla in spinning up a Mastodon instance only to be used by what <300 active users? Was the instance every actually open to the public? Seems to have been invite-only for the entire duration.
- jeromegv 2y ago
  Yeah that’s the biggest issue. I remember when it launched and it was invite only. If they indeed opened the registration at some point nobody knew about it. So they really failed at promoting whatever they were trying to do.
Vinnl 2y ago
Only a subset of Threads users are currently exposed to the Fediverse, and I believe only partially (not sure if replies have been enabled yet, and if they are, if they're visible as regular replies, or under a separate heading?). I'd also note that social media use differs hugely per country. See, for example, WhatsApp vs iMessage use in the US and outside, or how Brazil used to be big on Orkut. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from Brazilian usage patterns vs the rest of the world.
winwang 2y ago
I think the vast majority of users just want a good experience. UI fluidity, timeliness of notifications, DMs, image/video quality, etc. Decentralization is near the last of their concerns.

soupbowl 2y ago

[flagged]

maelito 2y ago

Maybe they realized Mastodon has no real migration from one instance to another, ant that it's been a criticized limitation since 2019. Edit : people answering my message probably think as I did that Mastodon enables messages migration (your posts), but no. The "fediverse" doesn't allow you to migrate your posts with your profile migration. It's like keeping your android contacts but losing all your photos. Well more precisely, they're on this old hard drive, you can't show them to your friends and the hard drive can disappear anytime. 2019 issue with 500 likes, core team doesn't care much. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423

api 2y ago
IMHO this is an absolutely fatal design flaw. It means that if it were to become very popular eventually the largest instances would take over the network due to network effects. ActivityPub has eventual centralization baked in. Nostr is closer to a real decentralized social network, though it has other problems. Chief among these is trying to be Twitter, which has always been a model of interaction that lends itself to obnoxiousness. This was also a problem with Mastodon. If we're trying to do better, we should not be trying to duplicate a toxic environment. Still Nostr is architecturally superior.
- ptero 2y ago
  Can you expand on the Nostr problems? Honest question. I mostly see it trying to offer another (architecturally better and robust to censorship) mechanism for group communication. I think (hope, TBH) that Nostr can fill the niche of the Usenet of the past where some groups did slide into obnoxiousness but others maintained intelligent and thoughtful discussions for many years. My 2c.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    I always liked the reddit post-scarcity solution to this -- make it as easy as possible to fork / start a new community. Users will vote with their feet. What was required to start a new usenet domain? (a bit before my time)

LeoPanthera 2y ago

Can we fork Mozilla? The browser can become a community product again? Where's Jamie Zawinski when you need him. It's time for a rewrite of the about:mozilla screen.

BadHumans 2y ago
Everyone whines when Mozilla does anything that isn't related to Firefox and I don't understand it. I use Firefox daily and I run into maybe 1 bug every 6 months which is much fewer than when I as running Chrome. What exactly do you want them to pour more resources into?
- dpkirchner 2y ago
  I think an alternative to Electron that makes it easier to write efficient desktop applications using web technologies would be welcome. Basically, figure out why so many Electron apps end up slow and laggy and make first-party code that does those tasks better (and in Rust, for nerd cred.) Edit to add: although I guess this would be related to Firefox. Oh well!
  - gnuly 2y ago
    something like [tauri](https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri)?
    - dpkirchner 2y ago
      Yah, seems like it
- lolinder 2y ago
  Dev tools have fallen way behind Chrome's. I'm the only one on my team who never switches to Chrome for debugging work, and when web developers switch en masse to Chrome for testing their code that hurts the diversity of the ecosystem. The sad thing is that dev tools used to be Firefox's standout feature, but it seems that Google got that memo and Mozilla forgot it.

Sarkie 2y ago

Social without social

FirstLvR 2y ago

Fediverse, sadly, goes against the full experience we requiere The objective is desc network but also want a single place for all our stuff, topics, news, etc Same reason why Reddit haven’t been replaced yet :/

FMecha 2y ago
This is what traditional forums excel at - for instance, a niche-specific forum may also contain off-topic boards for topics unrelated to the niche, such as general current affairs or media. wrt to Reddit, I mean, Lemmy does exist, but much like Mastodon instances try to be "another Twitter", Lemmy (instances) also tries to be "another Reddit". At the end of the day, it's a human/userbase problem of "platforms change, hivemind doesn't".

superkuh 2y ago

Mozilla slowly retreating from open federated protocols. They dropped off IRC a few years back, now off fediverse. When can we expect them to close the matrix server and start using Slack corporation?

sub7 2y ago

Here's a fun exercise - capture all the traffic Firefox sends to mozilla.com/org and mozgcp.net etc It's a shocking amount of telemetry, combined with dark patterns to reset settings on every update. Then you go to their website and see that "safe and private" is part of the headline sales pitch. Absolutely disgraceful.

chris_wot 2y ago

Every new initiative at Mozilla eventually gets shutdown. Seriously, they are worse than Google.

meiraleal 2y ago

It is funny how we (firefox users) take Mozilla's fails so personal. That something that became very common now tho. Mozilla is incapable of creating anything relevant in its current format, unfortunately. Soon, they won't have even a userbase to try these failed experiments.

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago

But I thought fediverse, threads, bluesky, my favorite political Oni, etc were all going to kill Twitter dead in weeks. Turns out Network Effects are a pain pain in the ass if you don’t have them, but also none of those ever had a chance to kill twitter.

krick 2y ago

It's seems clumsy. I wouldn't really cheer for them opening this Mastodon server or whatever, because, really, all that Mozilla is expected to do is to advance Firefox. But since they did, what's the point of shutting it down? It upsets some people, because "once again Mozilla turns its back at free and wonderful stuff", and I'd imagine running a Mastodon server must be virtually free, isn't it?

butz 2y ago

Mozilla should focus on building a web browser, and stop dipping into side projects. And by saying "building web browser" I do not mean "adding ads and AI into Firefox". We need an embeddable and reusable browser engine, which could be easily wrapped in UI and features, depending on what user actually requires for their task - "customizability" is a long forgotten word nowadays.