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?
> People have plenty control over what content they see
I think this is naive, and the overall comment is equally ideological as you're accusing mozilla as being.
Advertiser-funded social networks will always have incentives that are misaligned with users. They want to optimise for impressions so they can drive more views. It's been demonstrated so often that social networks optimise for engagement bait - putting content that drives hate clicks in timelines - to juice engagment numbers and get more ad views.
Decentralised and ad-free are distinct qualities of a social network, but they do work hand-in-hand to produce a pro-user network. It is harder for a decentralised modal to make an anti-user change because everyone else can work against them - we saw this to an extent with third party twitter accounts not having the algorithmic timeline.
> People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc)
Ehh… I'd argue those tools provide an illusory and superficial level of control. Follows and similar… Don't really work these days from what I hear, and blocks, etc. are specific to individual pieces of content. The algorithmic feeds are still working away, and tilt the entire range of content that users are exposed to.
E.G. Do most (2018) Youtube users even know that the platform is constantly and actively (if inadvertently) trying to radicalize them? Or do they just assume they see the same things as most other people, not think about it too much, let it fade into the background, and accept it as normal? Hard to have choice and agency when you're not even aware of the ways that the much larger and more powerful entity is trying to manipulate you.
We evolved to generally think that what we see is a representative sample of what actually is. When instead what we see is a constantly shifting funhouse designed to maximize clicks and ads by profiling us individually, the information asymmetry between the platforms pushing the "content" and the users consuming it makes it hard for me to believe that users even meaningfully consented to the situation, much less "have plenty control over" it.
> 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.
Edward Teach (ie The Last Psychiatrist) has this concept that it's not what we want, but how we want that really matters.
We have the illusion that we have agency because there's so much variation in what we want, but when you look at how we want, it's all served up in the same way. He uses porn as an example, where you can have any fetish you want, but how you fulfill that want is by scrolling though "content" on one of a handful of near-identical websites.
It applies equally so news and social media. The "what" is diverse, the "how" is hegemonic.
> social media companies are exceptionally good at figuring out how to show them more of the content they want
We have no way of knowing if that’s true. Social media companies show users what keeps them most profitably engaged with the site, and rely on the casual fallacy that engagement represents preference.
Decentralized, open networks do promise choice in a way that centralized corporate networks are unable to secure. That was as true for the future of Truth Social as it was for all the existing corporate networks.
Whether today’s most promising protocols for decentralized, open networks are going to be adequate and whether network effects are cohere on them is another matter. Mozilla seems more hopeful than myself.
The problem is that signs and that which they signify have becomes so far removed from one another that Pepe the Frog, The Pope, the OK hand signal and the purple teletubbie can be in a state of superposition with regards to meaning. This is a direct result of our ever increasing mediated existence.
The true meaning of a thing is dependent on the actions taken in response, cribbing Wittgenstein to bits.
Take a look at the actions people take while interacting with social media. Clicking, scrolling, sitting and staring at a screen while synchronized pixels entertain or enrage. That’s the entirety of the true meaning. Fictions are of course applied on top as the existential dread of being reduced to a servomechanism is too hard to bear.
The only solution is a conscious effort to engage in object-level reality and to deny the power of these increasingly amplified messages to form what you would consider truths about the world around you.
Is this a broad scale trend or is it just the only 5 videos of X outrage on the planet?
> People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc)
Only if you factor in content blocking extensions. Otherwise, how do I get rid of inorganic "recommended" (promoted) content? How do I get rid of the "Trending", "Shorts", and "Top News" crap without an extension? And controls like youtube's "Don't recommend this channel" and downvoting don't actually prevent youtube from recommending those things again, the official controls given to users for controlling their recommendations are unreliable at best, if not outright placebos.
Youtube could implement these features properly but don't care to. Extensions like blocktube are the answer, but it shouldn't have to be this way.
> 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?
Mitchell Baker - Mozilla's activist CEO - already answered your somewhat rhetorical question when she insisted "we need more than deplatforming" [1].
I'm all for decentralisation and I include decentralisation from an organisation like Mozilla in that drive. Why does Firefox sync insist on centralising authentication and authorisation? Why was the possibility to run your own FF sync server without any external dependencies on Mozilla-hosted services removed? Given that Mozilla has become more and more politicised it is not unlikely that Baker will insist on doing "more than deplatforming" to those accounts which do not fit her ideology.
That about sums it up honestly, this is the hard problem of the information age and there's no easy answers. Which is why it's so frustrating to see people arguing for totally unrestricted speech, I completely understand the desire, if it worked that would be ideal. But taking this stance requires plugging your ears to the harms and the fact that the lizard brain is not prepared for this. You are not immune to propaganda, to advertising, to emotional manipulation, to disinformation -- no one is. And the certainty that you are is what makes you vulnerable to it. You become your own conman and convince yourself. Being clever and persuasive is a detriment because you deploy all the logic and reason at your disposal to against yourself and your guard is down because the call is coming from inside the house.
This shit is only gonna get worse, the internet isn't getting smaller and the attacks are getting larger and more sophisticated. I genuinely don't know what the right course is because even education isn't it. A defense against the dark arts class won't do it because knowing how it works only helps a little in identifying when it's happening to you. People who join cults know they're in cults and it doesn't stop them. You still need the deprogramming after. This whole situation is awful and one giant mess.
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.
My experience is that the crap began with Firefox, Mozilla (the browser) was much better in terms of interface, and it felt better with xul (more control, much less bloat vs. Firefox + Thunderbird) than without it
Firefox was created by, and planned, and executed by people on Netscape's dime at first then on the Mozilla Foundation's dime.
There were a few really valuable volunteers that came later, PCH for example helped rewrite bookmarks before 1.0, but to suggest that Firefox just landed on Mozilla from "the community" is horse shit.
Firefox was a considered bet by Mozilla's leadership team in the summer of 2002. I know this because I was on Mozilla's leadership team and in the meeting where it was decided. It took place at a table outside of Netscape's building 21 after Mitchell'd been laid off but while a few of us still worked there to manage the Mozilla project.
The guy that started what would become Firefox, Ben Goodger (and who quickly abandoned it) was a Netscape employee. Like me, a couple years earlier he'd been hired by Netscape thanks to his Mozilla volunteering efforts. The guy that picked up the abandoned corpse and reanimated it was a Netscape intern named Blake Ross, a high school kid that I'd recruited into the Mozilla project as a volunteer. After Ben dropped it (perhaps to pursue Manticore, his .Net standalone browser project) Blake and I worked on it. Jason Kersey, another Mozilla volunteer that got a job at Netscape, contributed CSS and icons and gave us our first working theme I think (Remember mozillaZine? that was Jason, well, it was started by Chris Nelson, but Jason had mozBin, the place to go for binaries before Netscape/Mozilla provided them, well they joined forces for what most folks recall as mozillaZine's early years.)
A few of us worked on "m/b" for a couple months, you could find progress updates at my blog, and as summer got into full swing, a couple other members of the leadership team and myself, at an outdoor table at Netscape, pitched the larger group on moving away from the integrated application suite to what would become Firefox and Thunderbird. There were a few good reasons, but chief among them, I believe, in convincing Brendan and Mitchell, was that a failure of one could not tank the other as with the integrated suite. If we had a crasher in MailNews, it took down the Browser, the whole suite crashed, ugly. They were tightly coupled and with AOL in shut-down mode with Netscape, and resourcing in doubt, that was a risk that standalone apps wouldn't have. Also, if you didn't need mail, you didn't have to take on that shared UI overhead. Two .exes were better than one. There were other arguments made, Dave Hyatt, who was in that meeting as well, I think, advocated for "XUL done right" a clean user interface implementation without the Netscape compromises that made Mozilla and Netscape slower than need be. Dave created XUL, he was one of the architects of the cross platform toolkit that Mozilla adopted when it moved to NGLayout (Gecko). Well, staff@mozilla was convinced and we began planning the transition. A couple months later I shipped the first public version, Phoenix 0.1.
I may have a detail or two off here, but my point is I was there, an integral part of all of this, and Firefox was not "some community members" tossing something over a wall to a hapless Mozilla/Netscape. Firefox originated on Netscape's dime, by people Netscape harvested from the community, and Firefox's development up to v1.0, 95% of it anyway, was paid for by the Mozilla Foundation who employed Ben and Blake and me and others to take that prototype from a hobby project of a few Netscapers waiting for the axe, to a full product release with a strong and growing organization behind it.
Surely most of you know, but for those who don't, Dave and much of his Netscape team went to Apple and did Safari on KHTML and Ben and several other Mozilla and Netscape folks went to Google and did Chrome. Firefox was founded in part by some of the founders of Safari and Chrome. We all worked closely together for 2 or 3 years in the end-times at Netscape, a few of us a bit longer.
Were there volunteers that helped Firefox get to 1.0? Yes. For sure. Most of them were ex-Netcape(Mozilla) like Bryan Ryner, ex Netscaper who helped us go cross platform with Firefox. We had originally planned on Windows only with Camino on Mac and Galeon probably for Linux. Once we became the official Mozilla browser though we needed Mac and Linux support and bryner got those platforms standing up for us. We had two community contributed themes, before the Mozilla Foundation worked with artists and agencies to get a couple of professional themes. I mentioned Pierre Chanail's bookmkarks rewrite.
In the end, Firefox was a Mozilla project through and through. It originated as a pet project at Netscape, not "from the community" as you've suggested, and Mozilla adopted it almost immediately. Before it even had a name, when Dave, Blake, Ben, and I just called it "m/b" for mozilla/browser the cvs repo where it lived, Mozilla's leadership team, a group that included Dave and myself, were advocating for adopting it as the official browser. As Netscape was imploding and we were creating the life boat Mozilla Foundation, the few remaining Netscape employees and a few laid off or moved on ex-Netscapers kept it alive with the Phoenix 0.x release (I managed almost all of those) until the Mozilla Foundation was created where we went through a couple of quick name changes and it finally became Firefox. BTW, I believe Jason gets credit for the name Firefox. Not 100% sure but we were all at the same whiteboard and that's my memory.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
You might have good points about this usage of the deep web, but doing it on a platform like Discord is still pretty much the opposite of "avoiding Big Brother".
“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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
We're already entombed under deep layers of enshittification caused by excessive centralization. So if they're digging a grave it's just to meet us where we're at.
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.
[+] [-] tqi|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] madeofpalk|2 years ago|reply
I think this is naive, and the overall comment is equally ideological as you're accusing mozilla as being.
Advertiser-funded social networks will always have incentives that are misaligned with users. They want to optimise for impressions so they can drive more views. It's been demonstrated so often that social networks optimise for engagement bait - putting content that drives hate clicks in timelines - to juice engagment numbers and get more ad views.
Decentralised and ad-free are distinct qualities of a social network, but they do work hand-in-hand to produce a pro-user network. It is harder for a decentralised modal to make an anti-user change because everyone else can work against them - we saw this to an extent with third party twitter accounts not having the algorithmic timeline.
[+] [-] Intralexical|2 years ago|reply
Ehh… I'd argue those tools provide an illusory and superficial level of control. Follows and similar… Don't really work these days from what I hear, and blocks, etc. are specific to individual pieces of content. The algorithmic feeds are still working away, and tilt the entire range of content that users are exposed to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...
E.G. Do most (2018) Youtube users even know that the platform is constantly and actively (if inadvertently) trying to radicalize them? Or do they just assume they see the same things as most other people, not think about it too much, let it fade into the background, and accept it as normal? Hard to have choice and agency when you're not even aware of the ways that the much larger and more powerful entity is trying to manipulate you.
We evolved to generally think that what we see is a representative sample of what actually is. When instead what we see is a constantly shifting funhouse designed to maximize clicks and ads by profiling us individually, the information asymmetry between the platforms pushing the "content" and the users consuming it makes it hard for me to believe that users even meaningfully consented to the situation, much less "have plenty control over" it.
[+] [-] agionio|2 years ago|reply
I don't want to see what I want. I want to see what I choose. These are not always the same thing.
I want control over my own life. It doesn't matter how benevolent the dictator or how well they know me. It's not their business to choose what I see.
[+] [-] Yodel0914|2 years ago|reply
Edward Teach (ie The Last Psychiatrist) has this concept that it's not what we want, but how we want that really matters.
We have the illusion that we have agency because there's so much variation in what we want, but when you look at how we want, it's all served up in the same way. He uses porn as an example, where you can have any fetish you want, but how you fulfill that want is by scrolling though "content" on one of a handful of near-identical websites.
It applies equally so news and social media. The "what" is diverse, the "how" is hegemonic.
[+] [-] swatcoder|2 years ago|reply
We have no way of knowing if that’s true. Social media companies show users what keeps them most profitably engaged with the site, and rely on the casual fallacy that engagement represents preference.
Decentralized, open networks do promise choice in a way that centralized corporate networks are unable to secure. That was as true for the future of Truth Social as it was for all the existing corporate networks.
Whether today’s most promising protocols for decentralized, open networks are going to be adequate and whether network effects are cohere on them is another matter. Mozilla seems more hopeful than myself.
[+] [-] Gigachad|2 years ago|reply
Seems they only care about choices when they are choices they agree with.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
[+] [-] williamcotton|2 years ago|reply
The true meaning of a thing is dependent on the actions taken in response, cribbing Wittgenstein to bits.
Take a look at the actions people take while interacting with social media. Clicking, scrolling, sitting and staring at a screen while synchronized pixels entertain or enrage. That’s the entirety of the true meaning. Fictions are of course applied on top as the existential dread of being reduced to a servomechanism is too hard to bear.
The only solution is a conscious effort to engage in object-level reality and to deny the power of these increasingly amplified messages to form what you would consider truths about the world around you.
Is this a broad scale trend or is it just the only 5 videos of X outrage on the planet?
[+] [-] mcpackieh|2 years ago|reply
Only if you factor in content blocking extensions. Otherwise, how do I get rid of inorganic "recommended" (promoted) content? How do I get rid of the "Trending", "Shorts", and "Top News" crap without an extension? And controls like youtube's "Don't recommend this channel" and downvoting don't actually prevent youtube from recommending those things again, the official controls given to users for controlling their recommendations are unreliable at best, if not outright placebos.
Youtube could implement these features properly but don't care to. Extensions like blocktube are the answer, but it shouldn't have to be this way.
[+] [-] the_third_wave|2 years ago|reply
Mitchell Baker - Mozilla's activist CEO - already answered your somewhat rhetorical question when she insisted "we need more than deplatforming" [1].
I'm all for decentralisation and I include decentralisation from an organisation like Mozilla in that drive. Why does Firefox sync insist on centralising authentication and authorisation? Why was the possibility to run your own FF sync server without any external dependencies on Mozilla-hosted services removed? Given that Mozilla has become more and more politicised it is not unlikely that Baker will insist on doing "more than deplatforming" to those accounts which do not fit her ideology.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28959468
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...
(No idea how much they are still technically Fediverse-compatible ?)
[+] [-] Spivak|2 years ago|reply
This shit is only gonna get worse, the internet isn't getting smaller and the attacks are getting larger and more sophisticated. I genuinely don't know what the right course is because even education isn't it. A defense against the dark arts class won't do it because knowing how it works only helps a little in identifying when it's happening to you. People who join cults know they're in cults and it doesn't stop them. You still need the deprogramming after. This whole situation is awful and one giant mess.
[+] [-] coldtea|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g-b-r|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asadotzler|2 years ago|reply
There were a few really valuable volunteers that came later, PCH for example helped rewrite bookmarks before 1.0, but to suggest that Firefox just landed on Mozilla from "the community" is horse shit.
Firefox was a considered bet by Mozilla's leadership team in the summer of 2002. I know this because I was on Mozilla's leadership team and in the meeting where it was decided. It took place at a table outside of Netscape's building 21 after Mitchell'd been laid off but while a few of us still worked there to manage the Mozilla project.
The guy that started what would become Firefox, Ben Goodger (and who quickly abandoned it) was a Netscape employee. Like me, a couple years earlier he'd been hired by Netscape thanks to his Mozilla volunteering efforts. The guy that picked up the abandoned corpse and reanimated it was a Netscape intern named Blake Ross, a high school kid that I'd recruited into the Mozilla project as a volunteer. After Ben dropped it (perhaps to pursue Manticore, his .Net standalone browser project) Blake and I worked on it. Jason Kersey, another Mozilla volunteer that got a job at Netscape, contributed CSS and icons and gave us our first working theme I think (Remember mozillaZine? that was Jason, well, it was started by Chris Nelson, but Jason had mozBin, the place to go for binaries before Netscape/Mozilla provided them, well they joined forces for what most folks recall as mozillaZine's early years.)
A few of us worked on "m/b" for a couple months, you could find progress updates at my blog, and as summer got into full swing, a couple other members of the leadership team and myself, at an outdoor table at Netscape, pitched the larger group on moving away from the integrated application suite to what would become Firefox and Thunderbird. There were a few good reasons, but chief among them, I believe, in convincing Brendan and Mitchell, was that a failure of one could not tank the other as with the integrated suite. If we had a crasher in MailNews, it took down the Browser, the whole suite crashed, ugly. They were tightly coupled and with AOL in shut-down mode with Netscape, and resourcing in doubt, that was a risk that standalone apps wouldn't have. Also, if you didn't need mail, you didn't have to take on that shared UI overhead. Two .exes were better than one. There were other arguments made, Dave Hyatt, who was in that meeting as well, I think, advocated for "XUL done right" a clean user interface implementation without the Netscape compromises that made Mozilla and Netscape slower than need be. Dave created XUL, he was one of the architects of the cross platform toolkit that Mozilla adopted when it moved to NGLayout (Gecko). Well, staff@mozilla was convinced and we began planning the transition. A couple months later I shipped the first public version, Phoenix 0.1.
I may have a detail or two off here, but my point is I was there, an integral part of all of this, and Firefox was not "some community members" tossing something over a wall to a hapless Mozilla/Netscape. Firefox originated on Netscape's dime, by people Netscape harvested from the community, and Firefox's development up to v1.0, 95% of it anyway, was paid for by the Mozilla Foundation who employed Ben and Blake and me and others to take that prototype from a hobby project of a few Netscapers waiting for the axe, to a full product release with a strong and growing organization behind it.
Surely most of you know, but for those who don't, Dave and much of his Netscape team went to Apple and did Safari on KHTML and Ben and several other Mozilla and Netscape folks went to Google and did Chrome. Firefox was founded in part by some of the founders of Safari and Chrome. We all worked closely together for 2 or 3 years in the end-times at Netscape, a few of us a bit longer.
Were there volunteers that helped Firefox get to 1.0? Yes. For sure. Most of them were ex-Netcape(Mozilla) like Bryan Ryner, ex Netscaper who helped us go cross platform with Firefox. We had originally planned on Windows only with Camino on Mac and Galeon probably for Linux. Once we became the official Mozilla browser though we needed Mac and Linux support and bryner got those platforms standing up for us. We had two community contributed themes, before the Mozilla Foundation worked with artists and agencies to get a couple of professional themes. I mentioned Pierre Chanail's bookmkarks rewrite.
In the end, Firefox was a Mozilla project through and through. It originated as a pet project at Netscape, not "from the community" as you've suggested, and Mozilla adopted it almost immediately. Before it even had a name, when Dave, Blake, Ben, and I just called it "m/b" for mozilla/browser the cvs repo where it lived, Mozilla's leadership team, a group that included Dave and myself, were advocating for adopting it as the official browser. As Netscape was imploding and we were creating the life boat Mozilla Foundation, the few remaining Netscape employees and a few laid off or moved on ex-Netscapers kept it alive with the Phoenix 0.x release (I managed almost all of those) until the Mozilla Foundation was created where we went through a couple of quick name changes and it finally became Firefox. BTW, I believe Jason gets credit for the name Firefox. Not 100% sure but we were all at the same whiteboard and that's my memory.
[+] [-] jmugan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanniabu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] INTPenis|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] russellbeattie|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rsolva|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] bachmeier|2 years ago|reply
Let me suggest something crazy. Maybe a social network can exist and thrive even if there's another social network with more users.
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] friend_and_foe|2 years ago|reply
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-deplat...
[+] [-] madeofpalk|2 years ago|reply
> - 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?
[+] [-] sfink|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mjr00|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reidjs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ItsABytecode|2 years ago|reply
I’ve been waiting so long for my mastodon conversations to be seeded with high quality editorial publisher content
[+] [-] g-b-r|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willywanker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevincox|2 years ago|reply
(Although the code that does the auth does come live from the server which is a notable weakness)
[+] [-] james4k|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wannacboatmovie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yizahi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CM30|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mouse_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
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.
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[+] [-] g-b-r|2 years ago|reply