I saw a talk in 2009ish by John Lilly, the CEO at the time. Someone asked him a snarky question about Chrome, and I loved his reply. He said this was the world Mozilla was fighting for; where people had their choice of standards-compliant browsers. Mozilla did something amazing... it took a problem the average person didn't care about or understand (an open, accessible web) and paired it with phenomenal usability. That's their zone of genius.
I really wish Mozilla would do the same thing for privacy, data and user identity. Right now, Firefox is the only competitive browser not owned by a gigantic corporation. I really wish they'd spearhead a safe way to bring identity to the browser level, with a focus on keeping people safe and private.
They sorta tried with Persona, but it never went anywhere. Password managers are almost impossible to use for the average person, and Mozilla is in a unique position where they aren't a b̵i̵l̵l̵i̵o̵n̵ trillion dollar company (or having to raise VC money to build it). They could charge for a (headless?) email server that focuses on privacy, and pair it with an open standard for authenticating in the browser based on (any) email. We could get one-click logins across the web.
People still trust Mozilla (despite them doing their best to squander their reputation with releases like this). They could genuinely fix one of the largest problems on the open web, because they're one of the few companies without a prohibitive conflict of interest in the space.
Or do something else! I don't really care. But the world definitely doesn't need another Mastodon instance with the Mozilla logo, any more than it needed a cheap phone with the Mozilla logo or an IoT platform with the Mozilla logo.
Doing something without a profit motive is itself a left-wing act, that's why unpaid volunteers maintaining a site like Wikipedia might themselves have left-wing views. There's no shortage of profit-driven outlets available to balance it out.
The corporation part is kind of a legal hack, though. It's a corporation owned by a foundation and it answers only to that foundation. It has no inherent profit motive, no shareholders. Basically, this happened because search was an accident. By incorporating Google search as the default, Mozilla suddenly found a revenue source it did not expect. It created the corporation in order to better handle the influx of money without losing the nonprofit status.
So, while it has a lot of money, it's really at its heart a foundation, not a corporation.
While one is called Mozilla Foundation and one is called Mozilla Corporation, they are both corporations. You can see the Mozilla Foundation's articles of incorporation: "The name of the corporation is Mozilla Foundation"
I'm not sure what that means, but it's a 501(c)(3). Here is the foundation's annual report, for example:
> Established in July 2003, Mozilla Foundation (the Foundation) is a California not-for-profit corporation that exists to improve and protect the internet as a public resource by working with thousands of volunteers to 1) keep the internet a universal open platform and 2) promote continued innovation on the internet. The Foundation supports the development of open- source, standards-compliant, free internet applications useable free of charge to hundreds of millions of users. It also a) develops foundational technologies that can be used to build the values of openness and interoperability into the internet; and b) fuels the movement for an open internet through educational work that connects open internet leaders with each other and mobilizes grassroot activities around the world. The Foundation is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Too many of the identity and data problems are network effect problems, and ad revenue is the best business model that has been discovered for tackling those problems. The business model is incompatible with openness and user sovereignty: the dollars go to the platforms with the most users, and the other platforms die.
We can't get the Mozilla we want until they discover a network effect business model that's actually compatible with empowered users. Until each user gets to steer every advertising dollar on the internet where they want them to be spent, there's plenty of room for innovation.
Rather than focusing mostly on client-side software, I wish Mozilla would bet more into SaaS services like hosted email, and docs. I think a lot of people would prefer Mozilla over other options and it would be amazing to be able to use (and contribute to) open source SaaS apps, but hosted by an organization like Mozilla. It could provide another revenue stream for them.
> Or do something else! I don't really care. But the world definitely doesn't need another Mastodon instance with the Mozilla logo, any more than it needed a cheap phone with the Mozilla logo or an IoT platform with the Mozilla logo.
Strongly disagree here.
One of the big issues with Mastodon right now is one of trust. How do you trust that the people running the instance you happened to choose are going to be good stewards of it? I've already read about drama behind people running instances and instances shutting down, and I've never created an account on any instance for this reason.
Mozilla though is a real organisation with actual money, staff, and that reputation you mention.
I just signed up for the waitlist and am hopeful that Mozilla will follow through here.
> They could charge for a (headless?) email server that focuses on privacy, and pair it with an open standard for authenticating in the browser based on (any) email.
They even have an email client already (Thunderbird).
Sorta! It's no longer a Mozilla Corporation product, although it's still owned by the Mozilla Foundation (it spun off as MZLA). But that being said, yes, I agree!
(Thunderbird isn't great, though, and there's no iPhone version. I'd much rather be able to, for example, use Superhuman or Spark or something. Right now, I give Google all my data, and don't even use the GMail interface.)
Unfortunately Mozilla seems too afraid of giving up control. As far as I know, up to the point Persona went away the official deployment instructions were still "don't host your own copy, use Mozilla's, because it might change", effectively making the thing moot (still centralized). And for password management, bug 1344788 is still open so it's not possible for password managers to integrate with Firefox properly, and they have to do hacks that involve running scripts on the untrusted page instead…
Agreed! You’d click login, and a list of your email addresses / identities would pop up and you could pick one. No product would ever know the identities were connected; not even Mozilla (since it’s at the browser level).
> Password managers are almost impossible to use for the average person
Hardly my mother and Partner both quickly picked up and understood Keepass with little prompting beyond me opening it for them and telling them it's a file on their computer just like a word document.
If anything they have always had issues with browser password saving methods simply because it's trying to be "too smart" i.e. auto filling and suggesting passwords based on the url and only showing the username, which is always the same email address so that's less than helpful.
IMO FirefoxOS wasn't well received partly because it wasn't Android-based. Ultimately I wouldn't try to do a mobile OS without ~$10B in marketing/ecosystem funding.
I'd love to see this too. Would love it if it was an OS that scaled well from desktop to mobile (at least tablet) sizes. I'm a big fan of the basic idea behind Chrome OS. Not so much a fan of giving Google my info. Would be nice to have a real alternative in this niche.
The wonderful github UI links to all those commits as if they are within the mastodon project (and then prints a warning that they are not), which breaks all the issue numbers.
That's because that's the preview page to creating a pull request between those forks. It's a handy way to get a diff, but intended for something else.
I wonder if mozilla isn't already spread too thin... given some outdated documentation I regularly stumble upon, and my bad experience with their vpn offering.
One issue w/ their vpn was stability and speed (not extremely bad, but better now on a different provider), but the main crux was that they officially supported Ubuntu but would only support a new Ubuntu release many weeks after release date. So you were left without vpn (think they don't support plain wireguard/openvpn from CLI, you're stuck with a client not available for your officially supported OS...) or had to hack around to install the old version... An E-Mail I sent to support asking about this was ignored, I never received a response (as a paying customer, mind you).
Cancelled my vpn account then and there. Getting into the issue of running and moderating social media? Seems like the last thing I'd like to get into, when my goal is to write software and get stuff done. Especially with how toxically PC and about x-rights here/there/everywhere and "pseudo tolerant" parts of the software ecosystem have become (and those will be the ones most active on such platforms)...
Work on browser fingerprinting prevention, or on your browser engine, or consider maintaining an easy to install privacy respecting de-googled android fork... (bit out there already, still better than running a social media server...), bring more add-ons to firefox mobile, port more tor browser technologies to mainline firefox to be togabble in the settings...
Thanks for sharing as it might be helpful to people struggling w/ the same problem.
But obviously my point is that if I'm officially stuck to your client, maybe give me a working version when Ubuntu is updated, instead of me getting warnings about "no matching release candidate" (or whatever the exact wording) and me being vpn-less for weeks. If I pay I shouldn't have to rely on hacky stuff to just use your service. Also maybe react to an E-Mail I send to support? Also I personally am not using mozilla vpn anymore, but as said: maybe someone else can profit from your link.
mastodon.social, sciences.social, mastodon.cloud, mstdn.social, hachyderm.io, mastodon.online, infosec.exchange... Most instances I know of, have this.
Oh! I was already logged in on the instances that I checked, and that apparently disables this feature and only lets you follow with the account you have logged in. Thanks!
Anyone know _why_ this instance in particular seems to be such a big hit among Japanese speakers? (Assuming these are not all just spam posts, since the built-in translate tool isn't working for me and I'm too lazy to copy them all elsewhere)
The recent posts are mostly test posts, about people coming from Threads/Nostr/Mostr, someone testing mp3/mp4, someone testing animated GIF, someone saying translate (from English) doesn't work, "hello world" and "good morning" posts, etc. It's mostly the kind of posts you see on newly opened forums, as opposed to the news and random content on long established forums.
Maybe someone mentioned that sign ups are available in one of those other social networks to a mostly Japanese audience, or maybe time zone just worked out better (it's currently 10am in Japan).
I didn't get invite code beforehand I just signed in my Firefox account and it allowed me to register, maybe the sign up page message needs to be updated
Vivaldi.social has been live for almost a year already and is quite healthy. It also is integrated with Vivaldi's authenticated and has integration within the Vivaldi browser.
Why would this Mastodon succeed when all the others have failed?
And before you jump on with definition of "failed", I mean "failed to be the savior that replaced Twitter when Twitter went into full revolt this year".
Mastodon had its big chance at that point and failed to be the new Twitter. Meta/facebook Threads also failed, Bluesky also failed.
Disrupting Twitter is either impossible or the formula has not yet been found.
The Mastodon instance i'm on, mastodon.gamedev.place, works perfectly fine and has interesting content. Perhaps specialized instances (this is for game development) are more useful than grabbag instances (though of course due to how Mastodon works you can "follow" people from any other instance).
Mastodon has all the fundamental problems of email. It's actually worse because personal grievance can get you blacklisted by the cabal of major instances, instead of actual spam.
The big instances don't care about the blocklist fascists. Mastodon.art consumes far more air than their users and those of their allies should receive.
That being said, there are truly horrible servers that get almost universally banned. Many have borderline-illegal content and the rest have toxic content and users. The large servers have maintained a block policy resembling old Twitter. Unless we want a festering swamp of toxicity, that seems like a fair compromise. Anyone desperate for Gab can join Gab.
>rest have toxic content and users. The large servers have maintained a block policy resembling old Twitter. Unless we want a festering swamp of toxicity, that seems like a fair compromise. Anyone desperate for Gab can join Gab.
This is why Mastodon is doomed. Instead of being a common carrier, it seeks to make a network free of 'toxicity'---whatever that means.
Anything that crosses over into regulating perfectly legal speech will draw the exact people who shouldn't be regulating perfectly legal speech.
im skeptical of the "succeed" and "failure" descriptors people keep using regarding these places, but in terms of longevity, i think having multiple different spaces is precisely why Mastodon or some derivative will be booming.
in the real world, we have different styles of spaces with different styles of behavioral expectations. and we have these precisely because people prefer that kind of freedom. if i want a nice quiet dinner, i don't go to the loud sports bar, i go to a quiet restaurant. if i want a loud drunken night, i don't go to a string quartet, i go to a club or something. i pick my space based on my mood. simple as that. its not complicated.
bars and clubs have wildly different expectations of behavior for totally common sense reasons. i continually find it baffling (and honestly kind of weird) that some have convinced themselves that online spaces full of humans would be any different.
ive noticed this weird tendency over the past couple of years, that a certain type of people (many of them seem to be from the same group strain of VCs) have been desperately trying to convince us that we all need to be in one space -- all of us, at the exact same time, and anything less than all of us at once is "failure". and that having multiple options is somehow bad... and im sorry, but nah, thx tho.
sometimes we like a nice restaurant, sometimes we like to go clubbing, sometimes we like a coffeehouse with a few friends. again, this isnt complicated--its spaces full of humans, we have different preferences. this isn't new and it isn't shocking.
this is why mastodon (or some later branch) will thrive ahead.
Nah, toxicity is targeting a non-public figure for abuse or committing doxing. Toxicity is advocating for violence or other crime. It's a replying to a post with targeted insults rather than reasoned disagreement. It's racism and obvious sexism. You could summarize it as simple human decency.
The majority of us can agree on these standards. Despite that, I see plenty of people violate them across the political spectrum. It shouldn't be tolerated or respected, but you can hold a wide range of political beliefs without crossing that line.
> Toxicity is advocating for violence or other crime. It's a replying to a post with targeted insults rather than reasoned disagreement. It's racism and obvious sexism. You could summarize it as simple human decency.
This sounds fine without context, but according to wokeists, misgendering someone is “advocating for violence” and criticizing Islam is “racism”, for example.
Misgendering someone is not advocating for violence. Pushing a false viewpoint that someone is a pedophile or trying to peep in on the wrong bathroom can be, though. Criticism of Islam isn't racism unless you are doing it on the basis of race.
Mastodon doesn't seek to do anything. Instance operators decide their own policies and users are free to join instances that follow policies they agree with.
My experience is the opposite - any site that's created as a "free speech absolutist" site is doomed to become a cesspit nobody wants to visit, like voat.
You don't have unregulated "perfectly legal speech" on Hacker News; posts can be downvoted until they disappear at the whim of users. That doesn't seem to have doomed the platform.
Too much toxic content and spam, and I think there's a big overlap between the two, will make a platform unusable or at least undesirable to many. That's what happened to Usenet.
While your concern is valid, the blacklist weirdos have been blocking off so much of the fediverse that you actually don't end up losing much since most others are also blocked.
Talking about Mastodon in terms of it being "the new Twitter" is the wrong framing.
Twitter is not replicable. It was a central chokepoint for a lot of journalists and programmers, but that Twitter is gone. Nothing will replace it. In fact, given how poorly that place was run (even, arguably, before Musk shat on it), I don't think anything should.
Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky will all occupy their own corners of the social networking space. If they all adopt ActivityPub then they sort-of merge together, depending on how the instance operators decide they want that interoperability to happen.
(FWIW, a lot of Mastodon instance operators have already said "hell no" to Threads interop.)
Even more important distinction is that "Mastodon" is not a Twitter alternative, rather a framework that lets you build a twitter-like space. Instances have twitter-like feature set )p. It's totally up to the individual instance managers to decide which direction to take.
I don't know how to think about all this.. twitter centralization was a sizable enough benefit to me. Maybe I'm not understanding or approaching mastodon right but I'm never sure I'm at the right place or if I see everything I should see. Triggers some virtual anxiety / fomo somehow.
Threads is #25 on the App Store and based on Zuck's interview yesterday he is happy with DAU/MAUs and looking to back it for years to come. So clearly it hasn't failed.
And interestingly it may end up saving Mastodon since when it rolls out ActivityPub support it will mean 100+ million extra users being able to seamlessly interoperate.
Mastodon/Fedi doesn't need Threads to "save" it. I'm curious about the rationale behind this framing. It's growing well on its own, without some giant corporate backer. Many instances have already pledged to block Threads once they do enable federation to guard against data scraping and EEE.
Why does it need to "succeed"? It's first and foremost a place where Mozilla's brands and contributors can publicly post stuff on infrastructure they themselves manage. Interoperability with other fediverse instances/clients and hosting accounts for randos is just icing.
I think Mastodon will win by attrition. It'll win over users when Twitter does something to piss off progressives. And then it'll wane for a while, but never quite die because there sort of isn't anything to die. And then something will piss off conservatives and there will be a growth of rightwing Mastodon. And then it'll wane somewhat. And so on. Ups and downs but like Bitcoin the trend will be upwards.
Mastodon can not replace Twitter for obvious reason: scalability. No one aimed it. Bet to Threads for it.
Anyway it's great for me. It's unpopular opinion but it's good thing that Threads to add federation because we can connect to various user who never join "fediverse" like celebrities. Blocking it by instance is okay.
There are lots of non-english speakers in the world. The platform supports language filtering natively, so if you login you can chose to only see English posts
Trust: I already have to trust Mozilla to design, write, and maintain a minimally safe browser written in a memory unsafe language that also properly supports Ublock Origin just so the web doesn't appear like a bunch of blinking Las Vegas signs. If they can do that, they can probably also maintain an instance of a social network written in a memory safe language (and probably hack on it, too).
Bus factor: they have more employees than can fit into a single bus
Communication: whether its web docs or an article about some clever Firefox internal, Mozilla's communication is typically clear and fun to read. If something goes wonky on their instance, or even if some part of the Mastodon is wonky enough that it messes with the UX of their instance, their write-up will almost certainly explain things in clear language, even for a neophyte.
Laziness: what would you rate as the easiest and most obvious choice of instance for an American who knows nothing about Mastodon? Let's set up a time to discuss this over tea. In the meantime I'll go on the waiting list for Mozilla's instance and probably nothing bad will happen as a result.
+1 for the trust factor. However, it's totally fine to use another instance. That's the beauty of the fediverse, you can use whatever provider you want or even spin your own.
Once you sign in/up, you’ll also need to join a waitlist or input your invite, as it’s invite-only. Quite disappointing, especially when this content should already be accessible through Mastodon.
Am I supposed to join a waitlist for this specific instance? Feels like too much of a hassle for almost no reward.
That's by design. you can access content on any federated mastodon (and others) instance even if you have an account on another instance. You don't have to be on instance to communicate with their users unless they ban you or your instance or if they aren't federated.
"Mozilla.social is currently available to a closed beta group as we experiment, gain input from participants, learn, and improve the experience. Eventually we hope to build a safe, well-organized space within Mastodon that is open to all audiences."
What's broken about Firefox mobile? I use the browser exclusively on my android phone (it's even set as the default webview); I don't think I have any notable pain points.
I can't think of any times this has happened to me, at least in the last few years. (Using a Pixel 6, with hundreds of open tabs I have a habit of forgetting to close.)
> In August we encouraged developers to start preparing their desktop extensions for Firefox Android open availability on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). The project is progressing well and we’re on track to launch the open mobile ecosystem on AMO in December.
More simple than the known method of creating a list with the extensions you want and adding them to the list, then installing them, which is hacky and annoying?
The translate widget isn't working, on my mobile browser. As a product, it is definitely redundant and seems a bit late to the game, but I guess it won't hurt? ... who knows what'll happen.
> ... intentionally locking yourself into a bubble.
im not trying to be snarky, but, i mean, using a closed off eco-system like twitter and suggesting people to use "one" platform is quite literally bubbling yourself.
>using _other_ options is the opposite of a bubble.
Where the word "other" can be easily substituted for "alternative" means you're leaving the larger contiguous area for something smaller. Twitter is the de-facto town square, and considering one is likely most on one platform, staying on Twitter is the most "open" option for reach of both your words and your ears.
Of course if one has time, they read different angles from the same things from tons and tons of sources. That is what I do but don't realistically recommend it because of the time investment
I get where you're coming from, but I don't really think that's right. If Chinese speakers are 16% of the world's population, I actually have pretty decent odds of not having any in my feed or whatever.
No. You're being childish. Language barriers is something a good platform avoids you hitting in to, and instead of ever showing language that the reader very likely doesn't know, it would auto-translate.
I think Twitter has changed quite a bit. I don't think you have to use the new name. We can talk about "old Twitter" or say "Twitter used to be better."
Twitter clones tend to be a lot more bubble-like because they kind of try to seem like a "town square" but actually and up being more like a North Korean town square. Or a square in a gated community.
HN obviously is its own area like a subreddit. That is what I like about this place. Minimalist in scope and tech, no endless financial growth pressure as a project.
Twitter the service hasn’t gone anywhere but Twitter the, I dunno, culture? is long gone. A series of changes have made it a notably worse place to spend time… so I’m spending a lot less time there.
That said I’m not really using Mastodon either despite having signed up. It’s missing something too.
Now that lots of opinionated people have left Twitter, I feel, it's quieter and more pleasant to use. Not by a massive amount, but still.
Perhaps its my self-selecting bubble of people I follow, but it feels more like a source of interesting information now than a place where people fight with each other endlessly.
> Now that lots of opinionated people have left Twitter
lol?
But seriously, the platform now incentivises people posting bad opinions and starting arguments because it compensates Twitter Blue users based on “engagement”. Reactionary trolling is the inevitable consequence.
Like I said, it's possible that it's my bubble of following mainly spaceflight, programmers and comedians.
The fighting in the comments has quieted down a bit and it could a consequence that some of the people (some specific ones that I know of) that were the loudest left for Mastodon a while back.
So based on available data it clearly isn't where it used to be in terms of popularity. And based on poor Twitter Blue subscription numbers [1] and the fact advertising revenue has halved [2] the company isn't financially doing so well either.
This post reserves a prize for illuminating how something that looks authorative due to words like "based on data" and listing sources can still be extremely misinforming.
TLDR: Threads basically died quickly after its birth. Twitter for user count is doing pretty much as good as it has ever been doing. Considering the pointless outrage about it going to crash is dying, advertisers are re-warming their feet after ADL's previous nefarious influence on them seems to be waning, I can't think but of the "Twitter dead" rhetoric coming to its end permanently.
I mean, that’s clearly not true. But either way it’s funny, I think the doomsayers were so over the top at the start (“Twitter is going to die tonight!”) that absolutely any level of activity is held up as a great success.
Prioritising the replies of people who pay money for it was a body blow. Compensating those users for the engagement they generate is the death knell. You used to be able to find a ton of interesting conversation on Twitter, now the replies are filled with trolly garbage trying to prompt hate clicks. It’s just a bad way to spend time.
> Prioritising the replies of people who pay money for it was a body blow
A Twitter reply thread will only load around 200 Tweets in total, so on Tweets which have been in front of a lot of eyeballs, it's more likely that your reply will never be seen by anyone even if you pay, which defeats their whole purpose for ruining reply threads as a selling point. Just an incredibly short-sighted change.
My browser extension for Twitter [0] can hide replies from "verified" users - if you look at any Elon Musk tweet with this feature enabled, you'll be lucky if you see more than 1 reply.
Quote Tweets are where it's at now if you want to find comments on busy tweets which are somewhat better than all the boosted Twitter Blue users posting cry-laugh emojis, and they've recently made those take multiple clicks to access, from one of 2 different menus (my extension also restores the old Quote Tweets link).
I really wish Mozilla would do the same thing for privacy, data and user identity. Right now, Firefox is the only competitive browser not owned by a gigantic corporation. I really wish they'd spearhead a safe way to bring identity to the browser level, with a focus on keeping people safe and private.
They sorta tried with Persona, but it never went anywhere. Password managers are almost impossible to use for the average person, and Mozilla is in a unique position where they aren't a b̵i̵l̵l̵i̵o̵n̵ trillion dollar company (or having to raise VC money to build it). They could charge for a (headless?) email server that focuses on privacy, and pair it with an open standard for authenticating in the browser based on (any) email. We could get one-click logins across the web.
People still trust Mozilla (despite them doing their best to squander their reputation with releases like this). They could genuinely fix one of the largest problems on the open web, because they're one of the few companies without a prohibitive conflict of interest in the space.
Or do something else! I don't really care. But the world definitely doesn't need another Mastodon instance with the Mozilla logo, any more than it needed a cheap phone with the Mozilla logo or an IoT platform with the Mozilla logo.