Mozilla to explore healthy social media alternative | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla to explore healthy social media alternative

blog.mozilla.org

396 pointscpeterso256 comments

Interesting project, although in all likelihood vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars. Kinda like how school bullying appears everywhere, independent of culture.

That doesn’t mean that healthy places cannot exist or thrive, but it means that there will always be demand for the unhealthy. Tech impacts society, but we’re mistaken if we think we can change human nature.

I’d expect the outcome of the research to reach a different conclusion than people expect. For instance, I don’t think the typical system of likes and followers will ever be healthy. Beware of early results though, because it always takes a while for a platform to mature enough to see if it withstands the test of millions of users, socially speaking.

My WIP theory is: people-oriented public broadcast mediums always deteriorate towards the unhealthy with massive scale. You can have one or the other, but not both. (People oriented means that there is a strong focus on the people, usually with real name and face, or emphasizing the user/display name)

Anecdotally, to illustrate the point:

- LinkedIn became a cesspool despite having a professional boring focus. My theory: because it’s people-oriented and public.

- Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic, despite likes and reacts everywhere. My theory: private groups with implicit trust. No need to build your personal brand.

- GitHub has not deteriorated (a bit perhaps, but very much usable still), despite having likes, being a public broadcast medium. My take: it’s because it is mostly content oriented.

I think a big part (if not the most critical one) of this deterioration is the addition of algorithmic feeds. As soon as a company starts prioritizing content, it breaks the natural flow of a conversation we have in real life. This leads to group mixing, polarization, emotionally-charged content prevalence, etc.

I have never really used Twitter until very recently. It was shocking to me how much the algorithmic content insertion drives the conversation. E.g. I click on a link to read an individual thread: right in the middle of it, with almost no visual indication Twitter is inserting completely unrelated but "high engagement" content. It's brutal.

Edit: imagine group chats sorted by engagement... a pile of responses in a disconnected sequence. Someone said something funny that got 10 likes? Push it to the top for the next 2 hours! (I am tempted to build this as an experiment just to see how awful—or effective?—this would be like.)

This is it. It’s algorithms to drive “engagement”. Anger is easy to generate and match the algorithm to.

And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the heads of Twitter cynically tuned the algorithm to reward anger. If it's human nature to love a good fight, then unguided ML would generate a black-box model that promoted angry posts.

I never really got those conspiracy theories. The big secret is they're tuning it to make money. Money in the ad-tech age of the internet means eyes on content and engagement. Anger and clickbait and such are all incredibly easy to tune for. Plus it's not just the algorithms that are tuned for it, people, including the "creators" on any platform, change their behavior to do "better" on the platform.

It's just a feedback loop optimized for "engagement" which is the metric these companies are using to make more money from the companies buying ad-space. Occam's razor and all that. It's just about money.

I think I remember Facebook was pretty toxic even before it had an algorithmic newsfeed. Maybe not as wild as now, but people being mean to each other and saying awful things was very much a thing. Same with oldschool forums, too.

People kind of go through a contrarian phase. I read something the other day, probably on Twitter, that to get the answer you want, you deliberately put out the wrong answer. And leach out the bile to get results.

I think there are still lots of people that are on-boarding. And over time they simmer down. Much is poor etiquette unwittingly forced, as we have finger fumbling interfaces.

The insane thing are the second order effects, people are actively tuning their content for maximum toxicity because they know the algorithm will reward them with likes, followers and perhaps real life clout, votes, money etc.

So the service social networks offer to their power users is a way for them to profit from the public discord they instigate.

It's everyone personal tabloid they can publish with zero barrier of entry or friction and an already hooked global audience.

I struggle reading threads on Twitter, just as I do on HN. If I could watch the thread grow organically perhaps possibly via a visual map, I'd stand a chance. Fork a thread on Twitter and content can end up totally buried. It's useless.

HN is far more simple in approach, but you only really stand a chance if you monitor your own thread. Kind of. So you just end up glancing this and that. Or trying to read something and then give up. Threads only get traction for about a day and people fall off reading them precisely because engagement requires a silly cognitive leap.

Natural conversations are a bit all over the place, but the brain is quite good at forming some kind of narrative. Despite participants sometimes have wildly differing interpretations. These aren't even apparent in the moment. Ruminating delays, and going back to conversations from yesterday doesn't much happen, unless you have quite an intimate relationship with someone, or you are very topic focused.

Throw many disjointed feeds into the mix, and how on earth do you navigate them, let alone participate in them.

About the only thing that kind of works for me when thinking back is something like newsnet, with basic topic threading. With well considered posts.

Apologies for adding to the noise.

Very much agreed. Group chats and instant messaging are the prime social media platforms.

You won’t troll in group chats because you’ll be removed and it’s difficult or impossible to get back. Unlike public platforms where you can sign up for 300 new accounts behind vpns. The groups are small and everyone knows everyone so you’ll have a reputation beyond just being banned.

There’s also no global admins / thought police. Each group gets to decide on their own what kind of discourse is allowed (illegal content excepted). In a group chat your friends can discuss things which would have you banned from Facebook/etc. The platform won't push your content on others so independent group chats don't ruin the experience for other users.

Yeah 100%. Small chat rooms have been existing and thriving for years now. It didn't suddenly take the Twitter debacle to make them viable options. I mean, look at the drama spilling out of Twitter right now. There are HN posters posting 10-20 comments per day on every Twitter thread. Mastodon wasn't the beginning of private or small spaces on the net. I'm in dozens of them right now.

This makes me think that maybe Google Plus (God, what a shitty name), could have succeeded. The focus on sharing into circles of users who wanted your content would have made it a system where you pick who should view a given post. This circle-oriented sharing may have led to less self-promotion than the other platforms.

In practice the issue was few people understood and properly used circles. I mostly just used them to sort kinda a primary and secondary feed. One to keep up with, and one for casual browsing.

It's still just not as good as group chats. It has no community vibe as each person is posting to a different group of people. If I join a programming group chat, I'll get to know everyone there and the content will almost all be around the topic of the group. If I open something like Google Plus, it's going to be some content probably related to what I might like to see, but it's still just a public forum with no community.

Gchat is an absurd story of not realizing what was in front of it.

I believe social media apps are much like markets, in that the structure of the app determines the incentives and the interactions that happen there. I think most would agree that the 140 character limit had a profound impact on Twitter, for better and for worse. This is why HN remains stripped down, without Reddit features like message alerts and visible karma for posts, and why the lists were stashed away; these features don't work towards curious conversation. The things you're citing about group chats are structural, as well.

We aren't doomed to terrible social media. But tech companies, with their particular incentives to drive engagement writ large rather than healthy engagement, may be structurally unable to deliver a good social media app.

They give it away for free, want growth year over year and are answerable to their investors. That’s not a recipe for creating user centric applications.

I think the fact that there is a public conversation about what is healthy vs. what is not is a huge step in the right direction, even if human nature means we’ll always be fighting.

I strongly believe that in a few decades (probably sooner), the traditional social media platforms will be seen as cigarettes. Some people will still partake, but no one has any misconception about the harm they cause.

Healthier alternatives will be important in the long run, even if there is no perfect technical solution.

I do like your theories about why certain networks have fared as they have, and hopefully Mozilla comes away with some insights that might lead to something that highlights the good parts.

Cigarettes have never been a prerequisite to staying in touch in an increasingly disconnected world, though.

And neither are the most toxic elements of the current big social media platforms.

Even just a return to the basics would go a long way: Show me my friends' stuff, in order, and don't show me anything else. Let me stay up to date without getting roped into bullshit promoted on my feed.

Highly manipulative algorithmic content promotion is not necessary to stay in touch.

At worst, a less toxic iteration of a social media platform is the equivalent of e-cigarettes. Still addictive and not super healthy, still unknown how this mode of consumption will impact humans long term, but less likely to kill you from the obvious kinds of cancer.

Sure, but the corporations have incentives to run things the way they're running them now, and users will aggregate to platforms others use, which will in turn be driven by addictiveness. And you're not going to quit a platform if it means losing touch with your friends and access to your data on it.

> vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars

If there was a social media network that could exclude these things, then smaller would be fine.

I remember Google Reader as a brief, well-balanced example of healthy social media platform. It was mostly text, the selection bias was in favor of users who were savvy enough to understand RSS, generally interested in an array of different things, no engagement algorithms. The blogosphere that drove much of the content at the time was wonkish, (more) independent, often irreverent but also sincere about what a better future for human civilization and politics could be like. Haven't seen another thing like it since.

Reader wasn't really a social platform for many of those reasons. It was its integration with Buzz that gave it the ability to share socially with friends

I don't think this was the case as I wasn't a Buzz user. And yes, it wasn't _really_ a social platform, but you could share items from your own feed to other mutuals and converse under the thread that you (or they) shared. A couple other readers like Inoreader and TheOldReader later implemented stuff like this, but without the large user base that Gmail had it was pointless.

Its limitations were part of what made it thrive.

School bullying is nowhere near universally consistent. It’s twice as common in the US as it is in the Netherlands for example and the difference between schools can be far more extreme.

Citation? I found:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092217/bullying-in-euro...

https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp

Which suggests the rates are comparable between the US and Denmark.

I’ve seen slightly different numbers (11 v 21) for percentage of kids bullied each year, but I can just use your links:

Netherlands is 12% far to the right on the top link you just used, and it shows a huge range between countries.

The second link you used had 20.2% for the US.

PS: Did you think Netherlands and Denmark was the same country or something?

Probably mistaking Denmark for "Holland".

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The prevalence of bullying really does vary massively from country to country, school to school and even cohort to cohort.

Given how many people were very deeply and very personally affected by it, it's amazing that nobody's discovered how and why it spreads.

I've also read it's non existent (at least violent bullying) in Thailand. But I didn't look for proper research on this.

I think the more likely truth is that people crave utility and compelling novelty. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. all either had/have usefulness that their predecessors lacked or packaged themselves in a novel way that was enjoyable. No one cares social media is unhealthy because most people realize that 'unhealthy' in this scenario is more akin to the impact of fashion magazines on young women than the way in which smoking is bad for you.

Meanwhile Facebook groups and Facebook market are actually useful, Snapchat is handy for naughty convos, Instagram provided a more streamlined experience for people who actually cared about their wall on Facebook, and TikTok provided a less aggressively progressive video streaming service that offered tools to make content creation easy for Creators while providing Consumers with a wildly better recommendation algorithm than YouTube, mobile first design, and formatting requirements that ensured content is suited to the attention span of people on mobile.

You think school bullying is human nature? It might transcend culture, but I think it's a direct consequence of school as an institution. I mean, a school's proposition to students is basically this:

"You as a student have to spend most of your time with these strangers that we chose arbitrarily. If a conflict arises, you gotta figure it out on your own. Your parents won't be there to help you. Your friends may or may not be there to help you depending on how we choose (arbitrarily) to split you all up. If someone attacks you and you defend yourself, you'll be punished the same as them. If you refuse to participate in this arrangement, you're a criminal"

If I had to design an environment that was optimized to encourage and allow bullying to happen, it would look a lot like a school. Writing the phenomenon off as human nature seems super naive to me.

Bullying isn't exclusive to schools though.

That's true. I think the other places where it happens often have similar dynamics to schools. For example, in a workplace you might not get to choose who you work with, or be able to leave easily. That's less true of other cases like bullying in teams or clubs though.

I just know that, personally, most of the times I experienced bullying in school happened when I was separated from my friends. I think that the natural tendency people have to look out for each other is stronger than any tendency towards bullying, but that schools disrupt the balance.

People seem to pile in once someone starts, that is how bullying works. If nobody starts then nobody piles in, but at scale with social media lots of people will start, so then the masses pile in a lot.

Did you ever have "friends" as a child? Bullying was brutal in and outside school, and I was part of both ends (trying to show strength by bullying others to try to stop being bullied).

Of relevance to the topic, the people who study bullying see it as a group dynamic. Apparently this is true across cultures but some cultures prefer to think of it as an individual "bully", rather than a social process that everyone participates in by allowing it to happen.

My only experience of school bullying is purely anecdotal, from parents of kids suffering from it. The problem seems to be that a kid gets bullied, tells parent/teachers and the school then does everything it can to pretend it isn't happening.

The reputation of a school trumps anything else, it would seem?

Part of the purpose is to prepare you for the real world, which is far more brutal. Though bullying tends to be more subtle. Grownups have their lunch money taken all the time.

Your comment makes me wonder if bullying isn't like the alpha wolf thing in nature- seen only in captivity and a consequence of the need for a sense of control in an environment you can't otherwise control.

I think its just having a comments section. Which basically what twitter replies are or like linked in replies.

If books had a comment section they would be toxic.

Even this site gets toxic in the comments, there isn't any brand building, no real reason to collect likes.

Github can get toxic in pr comments.

Toxic behavior gets encouraged by likes and stuff. Ime the worst message boards were the ones with reputation that could be awarded or taken away.

Group chats have a social repercussions for being an ass. The internet doesn't for the most part.

Yeah there’s always instances of toxicity on anything large, even group chats like slack for instance. I am talking about overall trends on a large scale, which is hard to measure and subjective – but think of healthy as “producing more oxygen than it consumes” and vice versa for unhealthy. It’s just the least wrong but still general model I’ve been able to come up with. YMMV.

> Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic

This is a person who has never seen what WhatsApp groups look like in Brazil or India.

I don't think it's even country specific. There are just groups and groups. One has hundreds of users, most of which you don't know and the other is 5 of your friends that you talk to every week in person. One will be more likely problematic... (but also much easier to leave)

Don't discount the damage done by everyone looking for a way to get rich quick. I think something that has driven social online media (in the broadest sense) to become the cesspool it is now, is that people are building their "brand" to profit in some way or the other. This is not to say that previous online communities were not toxic, far from it (lots of epic usenet flamewars to proof the point), however largely people were not trying to "break the system" to somehow make money from it (similar to how spam has almost broken email).

What's funny is your solution would end up in something approximating the original version of Facebook

>there will always be demand for the unhealthy

Seems a bit like saying "there will always be demand for cigarettes". Social norms and "nudges" like no-smoking areas can go a long way.

People don't set out to have toxic experiences on social media -- they get sucked in and succumb to bad incentives.

Hacker News seems pretty good. Youtube comments have gotten better.

We're in the early stages here. Only a narrow range of platforms have been tried, and they've mostly been optimized for engagement rather than human wellbeing.

The more “focused” a group is, the more civil it is, or if it is too broad it needs extremely strict moderation. A good example is reddit, where the large subs like r/politics and r/worldnews are just cesspools like twitter comments and the more smaller and finely grained ones have serious and useful discussion.

It’d be interesting to see what would happen if Twitter copped the Reddit model. Separate forums dedicated to specific topics; moderated and isolated from the hellscape of the public space.

Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic

I've found several group chats to be deeply problematic (though of course I accept the possibility I could be the problem).

By definition they encourage group-think, and that, coupled with the lack of requirements for being a moderator (and the attraction of the role to narcissists and control-types) can be a pretty toxic mix.

I wish Mozilla would explore paying its CEO less and putting Rust, Servo, and embedding Firefox through the Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) at the forefront of their projects. We can do social experiments when your org and its projects aren't fading into niche communities and disuse. Wasteful organization with terrible leadership.

As far as I can see it the single most important thing about Mozilla today is that they keep alive one of two mainstream renderers that aren't owned by Google.

I think everyone who has followed the industry for long enough knows that if Chromium is the only option then Google will abuse it some way or another.

For now at least there exist two other teams outside of Google that knows how to create browsers and two working codebases so one doesn't have to start from scratch.

>knows that if Chromium is the only option then Google will abuse it some way or another.

It doesn't even need to be the only option; Manifest V3 (making adblockers impossible) already exists.

Are you familiar with declarativeNetRequest? It's already in use by tools like AdGuard and uBlock Origin Lite. I've tested both and they work very well.

I think it's very clear that adblockers are still possible in MV3, despite concerns.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adguard-adblocker-...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-lite...

DNR doesn't cover all use cases that uBO tries to address, AFAIK, so some tracking will still be possible.

Regardless, the point about a Google-only web resulting in restrictions stands even without that: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

I'm also happy that the project focuses on Fx’s performance first and foremost

I read through the page and these features seem... not great? Some of them might be considered anti-features.

The Browser Launch feature says that Firefox always waits for extensions to load network requests whereas Chrome gives an option to wait via a setting. So in this case, you're trading performance (parallelizing the work) for privacy (may not catch a tracking request). It's a tradeoff I'm sure many are willing to make, but I like that Chrome offers the setting. I tend to err towards performance, myself.

WebAssembly says it isn't used - not because it isn't available - but because it would add an extra permission to the manifest. That is to say, Chrome informs you of this when installing extensions and Firefox doesn't. That's a minor implementation detail at best, and I think a case can be made that providing more granular scopes is a positive thing.

Then pre-fetching. Are they really disabling a major performance feature by default? I've used pre-fetching to good effect when the browser's resource scanner ran at the wrong times. The option should exist but this is a terrible default.

The other features are more reasonable. HTML filtering could be useful for adversarial sites like Twitch.tv that actively fight adblockers. Storage Compression seems like a useful optimization if you have a lot of extensions installed that populate IndexedDB. I'm assuming it's caching those values rather than doing a "first time setup" every time a new private window is launched.

I'll readily admit there may be more intent behind these features than is expressed in these blurbs, but on initial glance I wouldn't say anything here is critical. The pre-fetching one in particular seems like a negative.

Hmm, I haven't looked at all of them in detail, but CNAME uncloaking in particular I believe is a very commonly used tracking vector.

MV3 doesn’t matter, though. It will only limit people who use the adtech browser. FF (and possibly the adtech downstream users, like edge or brave) will have their own version that extends the spec (thus not limiting (it’s not impossible) adblockers), while mostly keeping compatibility.

Manifest V3 will be a good step forward for Mozilla and FireFox as I anticipate loads of people to abandon ship...

Servo had always been an experimental renderer and most of its successful parts have already been merged in Firefox. It's been years, can you stop beating this merged horse?

Embedding Firefox doesn't increase marketshare and protects more people from tracking. Nobody gives a shit that your Electron app runs with Firefox and not Chromium.

Now, I do agree that the Mozilla CEO pay is way too high, but holy fuck find something new and useful to complain about.

In regards to Mozilla creating an Electron alternative, they already tried that. It was called Proton and it never caught on but was solely bleeding money so they had to shut it down again.

Proton was never mature or stable so saying it "never caught on" is a bit of a joke. It was never released.

It also wasn't equivalent to Electron for a bunch of big architectural reasons related to required changes to Gecko that the team never prioritises because Proton wasn't a priority project.

> was solely bleeding money

Yes. Because unreleased in-progress projects should be profitable before they're released in order to be viable. How much money was it bleeding? Do you have eyes on these accounts?

>Servo had always been an experimental renderer and most of its successful parts have already been merged in Firefox.

Wasn't it supposed to be a full on replacement? I get that they were still a long way off but it seemed like they got really far and what was there was super promising.

Nope. Servo was always a research project, meant to explore what was possible. Making a new browser engine from scratch is a stupidly long undertaking, and unless you're the SerenityOS guy that can afford to not have half the sites not working because you'll be working on it for the rest of your life, the only people that believed it would be a full on replacement and pushed that theory were reddit zealots.

Servo gave the following to Firefox:

* Proof that Rust can both be used to make browser engine components and easily integrate, with really good performance. Servo served as a way also to test out Rust changes and pain points that needed to be addressed.

* Stylo, a CSS rules engine.

* Neqo, an HTTP/3 library

* WebRender, the multithreaded rendering architecture that everyone was really thinking of when mentioning Servo

Which is really pretty much all of Servo. Html5ever is fun but unneeded.

>Servo was always a research project, meant to explore what was possible.

I suppose you're probably right but then why do they say "Servo’s mission is to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web engine"

>Making a new browser engine from scratch is a stupidly long undertaking

I remember running their testing snapshot thing a long time ago. It seemed like they managed?

"Our intention is to contribute to the healthy and sustainable growth of a federated social space that doesn't just operate but thrives on its own terms, independent of profit- and control-motivated tech firms."

And where will Mozilla get the funds to pay for this project. From "tech" company (Google) ad services revenue of course.

Mozilla will feed its users' web searches to Google, take millions of dollars in return, and then use it to free us from "tech" company tyranny.

Hold on. What.

Under the current arrangement, Mozilla cannot survive without "tech" companies. They have no other viable source of funding. Before Google, it was Yahoo.

This headline sounds like it came from The Onion. Something like "Phillip Morris to explore healthy tobacco alternative".

Mozilla announcements seem to presume that their audience are complete morons who will believe anything.

I wish Mozilla would offer a way to make ring-fenced donations. I love and use Firefox daily, and would happily pay a monthly "support" subscription or make monthly donations to the Firefox project, if I could be assured the funds would be spent on Firefox.

Yes...but ~every politician and sleazy executive knows this trick:

   function Accept_Designated_Firefox_Donation( $Amount )  {
      $Firefox_Designated_Budget_Allocation += $Amount;
      $Firefox_General_Budget_Allocation -= $Amount;
      $Crap_You_Hate_General_Budget_Allocation += $Amount;
      }

What makes social media unhealthy is a the fact the whole thing is a giant marketing exercise. Every company and every individual has their own brands to maintain. Even sites like Reddit have a brand and image to maintain.. with the right memes (whether political talking points or dank images).

Decentralizing has nothing at all to do with these core issues.

I wonder if a large part of what makes social media unhealthy is exposing human nature to mass communication.

I hate Facebook and Twitter as much as the next person, but maybe humans haven't evolved to be able to instantly reach an audience of thousands or millions without any personal or social risk. People have been dangerous and inhuman for many years in the past on a grand scale, but now every human can exist on a grand scale, and maybe the results of that alone are often unsavory.

One direction we could go in to deepen this conversation is to bring in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction. It potentially explains some of why mass social media communication is so problematic.

Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

> I wonder if a large part of what makes social media unhealthy is exposing human nature to mass communication.

Bingo. I do not believe for a moment that social media company A or B is worsening society. Heck, Facebook links your presumably real identity to your content and people are still disgusting online.

No company will win by not rewarding “interesting content”. We tried that, it was called forums, and they lost out to more “rewarding” communities.

Yeah, I tried Mastodon just yesterday and one of the first toots or whatever that I saw was someone trying to hawk a book they had written.

Good for them. If they wrote a book they should absolutely be talking about it.

If you don't like it, don't follow them.

I don't know the book of which you speak, but promoting your work as an individual or even an independent business is different from, for example a company like Doritos advertising their chips. I think the difference is apparent but I'm happy to elaborate if it isn't.

good for them.

Ok so we can go one step further, which is that most speech is a giant marketing exercise. Some people use it to great effect, others less so. And the ones that do get a multiplier effect from putting that speech on the internet/social media, so the increased reach.

I don't think communities having brands is marketing. That's just community groups: communities have in-jokes, memes, vulnerability, sharing, cultures. HN links to that one dropbox comment. That isn't dropbox marketing or whatever that's just a self-effacing ingroup joke, only tangentially about the company.

Marketing might hijack these groups to sell things, but I don't think just the act of memeing to be marketing or selling anything.

Most start off as a pretty positive experience, which is what makes them so popular! But once they've got that network effect going, people become disinclined to leave, even as the platforms try to monetize and in the process turn into finely-tuned human manipulation platforms.

If a platform like WT Social could gain traction it might work as a sustainable alternative because it lacks that desperate drive to squeeze cash out of people's brains. Currently I'm really enjoying BeReal, but I know it's a matter of time until their fun and playful mechanics turn dark.

> What makes social media unhealthy is a the fact the whole thing is a giant marketing exercise.

No. That's not the problem.

Remove all ads from Twitter or Facebook, bestow a quadrillion-dollar endowment on them, and they'll still turn into shitty, toxic cesspits, because of the way the algorithms bring different people together... In a way that tends to maximize anger.

Now, it's true that 'maximizing engagement' was the reason that those algorithms were built the way they were, but that's only tangential to chasing ad revenue. As long as there's work being done on growing the network, regardless of the reason, the temptation to build it out in that toxic manner will be present.

I'm going to have to disagree here.

Remember how they started out without "algorithms", only a time-ordered feed ?

A completely opposite counter-example : fitness memberships don't care about your "engagement", only that your keep paying your monthly subscription.

The paid ads on Twitter and Facebook are hardly the only marketing efforts you see on those sites. In fact I’d say most of the marketing we’re exposed to on Twitter and Facebook isn’t via “ads”.

Guerilla marketing and propaganda is annoying, but hardly the worst aspect of those sites.

100% agreed. Toxicity of social media comes from the "look at me!" and "I'm implicitly better than you" mentality. Most people have egos, which is fine and necessary, but social media gives free reign to let those with huge egos use their looks or material goods for attention seeking and any criticism is blocked or met with "haters gonna hate.

Seems like Mozilla is just hopping onto the decentralization/Mastodon bandwagon; where was Mozilla when Mastodon was a fledging new company?

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/official-mozilla-presence-on...

And never we forget that Mozilla talked about integrating moderations into their own browser...

While attention-seeking and "influencers" are problematic, I agree, when I look at how toxic political discussions have become, particularly in America, I don't see attention-seeking as the problem here. Instead, it's a clash of ideologies, compounded by people's ideologies becoming warped by exposure to others (people becoming "radicalized").

I think it's a mix of both clash of ideologies, and attempts to outdoor the other with snarky responses. Throughout history political ideology has had strong opinions from opposing sides, but typical only a subset of people were given an opportunity to voice them. Now, anyone can and a lot of it does seem to be pure snark.

Companies are different from individuals.

Yes. It's why there's so many people who wanted to quit Twitter recently, but couldn't. They went and tried Mastodon/Hive/etc, but couldn't adjust to having less followers out of the gate. Their brand exists on places like Twitter. In some cases they need it to make money. But even for users with smaller followings, it's where their largest engagements are. And too many people don't want to give that up and start over. The venue for their current brand has to seize to exist before they'll move.

Funny that you mention engagement. I've been witnessing many people in the fedi who say they have much less followers now but the engagement has been so much better than in Twitter since many years.

And the comments have been good and constructive...

It's exactly like that.

Similar to how a post here on HN can have five comments, and the same post on Reddit five hundred. Four hundred trying to make funny quips, ninety trolling, and the rest hidden in the noise. Yet on HN at least three offer real insights, ask good questions etc.

Threads and conversations on the fediverse, currently, are just so much more engaging, positive, insigtfull than on Twitter, it's bonkers. But also in sheer numbers. The same post on twitter gets far less engagement than on fediverse: measured entirely unscientific, but visible nonetheless.

I've seen a lot of that too. But good luck convincing people still on Twitter. They're too attached to their brand existing there.

My friend in the sales dep always says “everything is sales”. Someone is selling to you and/or you are selling to them deliberately or not.

Probably a cynical view of the world but I just remembered it while reading your comment.

There's no healthy social media. Please focus your resources on Firefox.

> There's no healthy social media.

I am a bit more optimistic than that. Social media depends on how we use them, but because technology is advancing so fast, a lot of people have yet to settle on a usage pattern that is healthy for them.

But I do agree on Mozilla should focus more on Firefox.

Technology isn't going to advance at a slower rate in the future, which means that even with your "optimistic" take people wont settle on a more healthy usage pattern.

But the whole point is moot anyways. As long as SM is designed to drive engagement by exploiting the most base instincts in us, we will keep seeing unhealthy behaviour.

There is no healthy social media.

Until number of emotionally unhealthy people is <<<< mature healthy people, with time, SM will always be unhealthy.

You know what would be even healthier? Browser competition.

Why does a browser company need to own a social media space? I am an avid Firefox user but don't see any pragmatic point in this "exploration".

Maybe they want to own their instance and therefore control their identity? That kind of makes sense—we might see more of that from individual businesses in the future. But this announcement is not about that.

> Why does a browser company need to own a social media space?

Mozilla isn't a browser company, and did you read the post? All the examples cited where decentralized/federalized alternatives. They specifically DON'T wanna own anything

They literally say in the first sentence that they will run a public instance on Mozilla.Social. This means they will own that instance.

You could argue that no one owns anything exclusively in today's federalized world but that is not true in practical terms. They will own the identities/social graphs/content created locally. "Own" meaning they have total control over that instance and can, for example, enforce Mozilla-friendly policies, remove content, ban users (without the ability to export one's identity and social graph).

But Mastodon is specifically built against that. Users can freely migrate their accounts and all posts are still accessible on other instances (up to a point). The whole point of Mastodon is that users and their content have "exit".

If Mozilla does some weird shit with their instance, people can just... use a different instance. That's kinda the point. And Mozilla's instance will surely take the Mastodon Server Covenant which, among other things, requires users be notified at least 3 months ahead of time before a server gets shut down

You are misunderstanding federalization. People can migrate their account and social graph to a different instance _only_ if the current instance allows them to do that. If you are banned from Mozilla.social - you can't migrate. The instance owns you.

While Mozilla is best known for Firefox, they already have a lot of experience in another software for a federated protocol : Thunderbird for e-mail.

Are you seriously asking why they would be interested in the Fediverse ??

Were you questioning Opera (now Vivaldi) when they were experimenting with all those weird browser features ?

    Are you *seriously* asking why they would be interested in the Fediverse ??

I think it's entirely valid to point out that for the last decade, Mozilla has been distracted with side projects that haven't gone anywhere (Firefox OS, Persona, etc), while the browser has languished. And now we see Mozilla pursuing yet another side project that, let's face it, will probably die an unmourned death in two or three years, while Firefox still languishes.

Furthermore, given that Mozilla very recently had a round of layoffs, ostensibly to cut the fat and refocus on the browser, where are they going to get the developer resources to work on this new project?

Imagine if Firefox OS would have gone somewhere. We would have an entirely open mobile OS right now, breaking up the duopoly of Google/Apple. I don't blame them for trying.

I do. Imagine if Mozilla, instead of trying to make another mobile OS to challenge the Apple/Google duopoly, had focused on making Firefox a top-tier browser, both on desktop and mobile? We might be in a situation today where, certainly on Android, there would be more than one option for a mobile browser.

We are rapidly regressing towards where the web was in 2002, only with Google Chrome taking the place of Internet Explorer. Could Mozilla have prevented this by focusing on Firefox? I don't know. What I do know is that they didn't even try.

What makes you say that Firefox isn't a top tier browser ? Including on Android ? (Where the cards are stacked against it, better dump Android at this point anyway.)

This goes double for when Firefox OS was around : 7-9 years ago.

If Firefox were a top tier browser it wouldn't have bugs that were old enough to legally purchase alcohol in the United States [1]. Or have bugs that are old enough to have a drivers' license [2]. It wouldn't have decade-old bugs that break AJAX forms [3]. It would correctly support prefetching links [4].

And those are just the outstanding bugs. In terms of performance, Firefox is still slower than Chrome. It still has more UI jank, even on Linux. The new plugin API still doesn't give extensions the same level of functionality that they had with the old API, despite years of promising otherwise. Its responses to interaction media queries are inconsistent, necessitating the creation of a test page [5] to determine what its actual responses are (W3C specifications? what are those?).

No, Firefox is not a top-tier browser. It's more privacy-preserving than Chrome, which is why I use it, but I will never claim that Firefox is a better browser.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10212

[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317081

[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654072

[4]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1527334

[5]: https://demos.obormot.net/interaction-media-query-test

EDIT:

    better dump Android at this point anyway

Dump Android for what, exactly? An even more user-hostile platform, like iOS?

Being worse than Chrome doesn't mean it's not top tier. Agreed about the old loss of functionality. At least performance is better now.

No, most people should be using a dumbphone these days, at least until we hackers get our shit together enough that alternatives Librem/Pinephone are good enough.

I don't think Firefox is in the place where it is today because of technological reasons. It's there because of Google's marketing power (i.e. putting Chrome ads on the front page and Gmail, and bundling it with Android) and bad marketing by Mozilla. If Firefox OS would have succeeded, it would have propped up Firefox along the way.

Good point about the layoffs, but, like startups, most side projects never go anywhere, why would you expect them to ?

Last I checked, the average failure rate of software projects was 90 % (which is a good thing, other kinds of projects, like bridges, can't afford to, and have to be "over"engineered).

Yes. I don't think they should invest into social media experiments. In my opinion they did a horrible job at that so far (Pocket was promising but is unusable because of its "social sharing" confusion). Social media introduces wrong incentives.

[reposting my earlier reply] Furthermore, I imagine the reason they are so keen to be a player in social media is because someone at Mozilla really promotes the idea that there is a community around Firefox (sure, Thunderbird, MDN, etc). There is no community. People who use a browser are not a community: we don't need a place to "hang out" because we all use Firefox. It's a ridiculous aspirational thinking that only moves Mozilla further into irrelevancy.

Why not, worked pretty well for Opera/Vivaldi despite them being closed source !

Also, ok, if not social media as a Mastodon instance, then what kind of project do you suggest they should start in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse ?

I can't tell if you are trolling or are serious. Neither Opera nor Vivaldi have succeeded as social media platforms. They experiment a lot with different features but remain a minuscule niche browser. If that's the inspiration for Mozilla - then sure, they should go all in into social media.

> in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse

What does that mean? What should Ableton Live or Pixelmator Pro do to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse?

Because it's a Web standard that Mozilla should pay attention to ?

I don't see how twitter is essential to the browser space. I can see how a site like del.icio.us is essential or flickr is essential or OneDrive/GDrive is essential. But not twitter.

This is nothing more than an open-source attempt at mastadon, and possible diversification for Mozilla.

We can expect more open source diversification attempts in the future.

BTW, where is an open source email service network? And open source identity service network? And open source password saver network?

What are you talking about, Mastodon is open source...

> BTW, where is an open source email service network?

That's what most email that isnt run by Google and Microsoft has always been...

I think Mozilla intends to develop mastodon further by first becoming a major player.

And I mean open source email server. Something like an alternative to an enhanced email server like ms exchange or even gmail.

> And I mean open source email server. Something like an alternative to an enhanced email server like ms exchange or even gmail.

Like I said, all of the other ones are open source.. There's dozens. This seems like you just don't know about them.

E-mail has always been decentralized. But if you're looking for a feature-packed server/client, then maybe iRedMail and Roundcube will do?

As for identity service, in its early years OAuth had many service providers. But then the providers don't bother to maintain the service so many sites also stopped using OAuth as login alternative due to unreliabiliy of the feature.

For password saver, KeePass + (sync service of your choice) also works? (Personally, I don't use it)

I didn’t hear about keepass before. Mozilla used to have Firefox lockwise. But then retired it as a standalone service model. It would have been a great replacement to lastpass or Bitwarden. And a great way of entering the oauth service market. The other oauth players attached it to their primary service(s). Deactivate service means deactivation of oauth.

I had not heard of red mail or roundcube either. Mozilla stopped innovation on thunderbird and have now tried to go to thunderbird on mobile. What they sh/could be working on is “thunder nest” aka email server software.

we dont have that atm?

I could be inferring something the OP didn't intend - but I took their comment to indicate Mozilla should "stay in their lane" and focus on making an incredible web browser - not some side project/distraction that will inevitably fail.

Additionally, firefox has an abysmal market share currently, about 3%, not much different than Samsung Browser of Opera. If Mozilla want to make a competitive browser, it may not be the best time to devote resources to having a me too offering that rides on a current wave of interest

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Mozilla has been distracted with side projects and posturing for so many years... one has to wonder if they can even find their way back at this point.

What would Firefox have to include to draw people back? The browser is solid, IME, so I'm not sure what they'd be doing if not their side projects. Do they need to figure out some way to market it as a viable alternative to Chromes?

Well, for starters - they need to figure out why all the browser skinners (Edge, Brave, etc) keep using Chromium as a base instead of Firefox. I don't pretend to know the reasons - but I would wager there's some pretty good reasons Chromium is dominating that space.

Microsoft and Google are at total odds with each other - I can't imagine using Chromium as a base sent people skipping down the halls in Redmond.

One thing that they could do is make Firefox at least as responsive on iOS as Safari is.

I know that browsers on iOS are forced to use WebKit (although that might change soon[1]). But Safari is also using WebKit, and the lag that I get in Firefox when opening a new tab is testing my commitment to them.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/14/apple-considering-non-w...

not pissing off power users - who are the only people who use firefox - in an utterly futile attempt to attract the general population.

this plea - that many people had made over the years - falls on deaf ears. mozilla is now ran by the kind of people who knows better than its users what we need, and we're wrong if we disagree.

Important. Firefox got where it was partially because many of us installed it for coworkers and relatives and everyone else, not because ordinary users sat down to try to figure out what browsers existed and which one was better.

Towards the end, Firefox was an easy sell.

And, as you write, today they don't care or even actively resist when we try to help.

Copying Chrome perfectly won't get any their users back.

Funding all kinds of weird side projects won't get users back.

Amazing, resource-efficient skinning might get some people back.

Tree Style Tags and other plugins working amazingly well might get some users back.

And when they start listen and fix the things we report things can improve very rapidly.

There are also probably a number of other improvements that can be done (I've advocated looking into doing the same as asm.js, but with html and css: something like a put meta-tag announcing html-lite or html/asm or something in the head, use a restricted set of css and html that is rendering friendly and only uses these well thought out js-libraries and we will pass your code down a much more efficient rendering branch!)

Bring back the things that made us power users love it and generally start caring more about bug reports.

Firefox market share is 7.1% on desktop - not great, but more than double the aggregate, which should tell you something. Competing with Chrome on Android or Safari on iOS is virtually impossible. The ability to sync bookmarks, passwords, credit cards, etc. through the primary browser on Android to the desktop, and/or vice versa, ended the competition. The problem for Firefox/Mozilla is that the landscape for distributing a browser changed in a highly unfavorable way for an independent developer. We're not going back to the old days without a competitive mobile landscape (not happening).

Now, that doesn't put Mozilla's decisions or operations beyond scrutiny, but set expectations reasonably. Firefox is already a competitive browser, and even dramatically leap-frogging Chrome would do nothing to market share.

Pretty much this. A 4% share would be better than a 3% share. The browser is still good, but the wider company just does weird shit.

I hope Firefox devs for the code and establish their own foundation, Id give Firefox money, but not Mozilla - I’m not interested in funding a bunch of wannabe tech bros weird exploration of projects destined to fail.

Not really, no. Marketshare is currently split roughly 3% Firefox, 18.7% Safari, 78.3% Chromium variants (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, etc). If Firefox disappeared almost nothing would change, which is not good. Ideally Firefox's share should at least equal Safari's so developers can't ignore it with impunity, and in a perfect world it'd be split evenly three ways so Google can't steamroll through when Mozilla and Apple disagree with them.

Safari is going to drop big time when alt browsers become mandated on iOS by the EU. We will have chrome and chrome forks only.

I too think that unfortunately, this is what will happen. There's practically no chance of Firefox for iOS making significant headway.

The only silver lining is that this might land Google in an antitrust lawsuit that forces them to spin Chromium and Blink off into a Mozilla-like nonprofit with wholly independent leadership, which is about the best outcome possible in a single-web-engine world.

I'm old enough to remember when it was netscape or IE... thats it.

so I see today as fairly diverse

Kinda off topic and really barking up the wrong tree. Mozilla is literally the only company maintaining a non-webkit browser (Blink is still a WK fork)

I agree, Mozilla building a social network is off topic, they should remain on topic, making a browser.

Who’s going to pay for that? They’re completely dependent on Google right now.

Afaik There’s no way to directly donate to firefox, which I would do, but there’s no chance I’ll be donating to Mozilla when they waste money on this kind of stuff.

So I assume the same people who would be paying for the social network.

I think the best social media experience is just to participate a little here, and little there, use email, have your own website, have a separate place for photos, a separate place for discussions, use relatively back-water like this, etc.

The reason is that without a massive, centralized network, no company can benefit from it in a mass-production advertising/factory sort of way like Facebook. That's exactly why I refuse to use Facebook and I've never had an account. Spread it around, and don't put all your eggs in one basket. In fact, I don't think we even need huge social media companies and we'd do just fine without them.

Critically reflecting on the harms of social media is a commendable effort. But I think this analysis and the implied conclusion is superficial and misguided:

  In private hands our choice is limited, toxicity is rewarded, rage is called engagement, public trust is corroded, and basic human decency is often an afterthought.

On a platform that is not centralized but consists of smaller competing providers, the incentives are the same for each provider: to maximize engagement. And given our current experience, the most effective way to do it is to incite anger and fear.

Decentralization does nothing to address the core problem.

First, that's then not a platform, and second, this doesn't seem to have happened with the known examples like usenet, e-mail, IRC..?

That is true but I think that was not because they were decentralized but because they were not run to raise revenue.

To my knowledge there isn't any one fediverse server that is being run to raise revenue. If there's any money involved it's usually for running the servers.

Why are the incentives for each provider to drive engagement? If I host a small server in the Fediverse, maybe I don't want/need engagement but happy users who appreciate a healthy community and are willing to pay a dollar a month to keep it running.

I can compete with other providers, but I don't need to out-compete them.

Mozilla comes to this equation with their totally out of touch bullshit approach. Just like they fucked up their browser market share, now they are the missionaries of privacy and the people and the trees and world peace. While 99% of people do not know jackshit about all this. Therefore they DON'T CARE. Imagine how successful will this become.

> In private hands our choice is limited, toxicity is rewarded, rage is called engagement, public trust is corroded, and basic human decency is often an afterthought.

Sure. But why is it so? Have these "private hands" somehow made people into toxic, rage-filled robots lacking "human decency"? Or, were people already like this before they started using social media, and these "private hands" really did nothing but follow what people craved and rewarded with their attention?

It's easy to paint Big Social Corp as evil, and yeah, of course they are to some extent. They literally just do what makes them the most revenue in ads, without any regard for how that affects their users. But I think we're missing something when we absolve individual human beings from responsibility, and paint them out to be mere victims of the siren song of social media.

There's an old web comic that I'm sure a lot of you have seen, that simply makes the claim that:

> Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad

I am a fierce proponent of the right to anonymity online -- BUT -- social media is but a subset of "the Internet". There is nothing saying that anonymity must be, or even should, be the norm on any web platform regardless of its purpose.

I have no concrete suggestion on how to do it, but personally I'm quite confident that if you remove "anonymity" out of the fuckwad equation, you don't eliminate the problem, but you decimate it to a degree where it's barely a problem anymore.

I very much doubt this is the road Mozilla will choose to take, since it seems completely opposed to everything they stand for, but I'd like to reiterate that you can be a privacy proponent without demanding privacy everywhere, just like you can be a proponent of free speech without being a proponent for "the right to be heard".

I think LinkedIn is a good example of what you would get without anonymity… and it’s a pretty bleak and boring landscape.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a middle ground for public forums. Humans seem to be hardwired to be awful when given the opportunity.

The days of cable TV and email list flamewars seem pretty quaint right about now.

> I think LinkedIn is a good example of what you would get without anonymity

I think that would be true if the only characteristic of LinkedIn was that it's "not anonymous", but that's not true. LinkedIn is very explicitly a "professional network" which means that the implicit expectation is that you modify your behavior in the same way as you would in a professional setting.

At least in theory, I think that a social network similar to Twitter or Facebook that contained only verified profiles of real people is something that would make me interested in signing up. Whether that's true for people in general though, I have no idea.

Didn't Google+ try to do that already? I remember they banned users with fake names, or with real names that looked like they might be fake.

They did and people freaked out. Other than mismanagement, I think that move is one that doomed the service. Would have been interesting to see it through.

I don’t agree that “banning users with fake names” is functionally equivalent to “ensure all users have verified identities”.

What about federation makes social media healthy? From what I've seen, the problems that keep coming up are not related to the network architecture, they're more about how people cannot relate to each other in a healthy way. If Mozilla has a solution to this, they should get a Nobel Peace Prize. On the other hand, if their idea is "this time it'll work, because it's us doing it" then I'm pretty skeptical.

“Healthy social media” is a hilarious contradiction in terms. The entire internet became wholly unhealthy once people stopped fragmenting into little silos like chatrooms and interest-specific forums.

“Social media” is just a concept for aspiring ad companies to figure out how to drive engagement.

Everyone that attempts it eventually figures out the same thing: To drive traffic you’ll need culture wars, porn, shock images, and hate speech. People love interacting with all of that and there is no un-ringing that bell.

Mozilla Firefox as a tool is awesome and I'll continue supporting it but as an organisation, Mozilla has clearly signalled more than once that they don't want healthy, they want agreement with their own brand of US partisan politics.

They will run opposite to their old values of freedom and push the new and tired "censorship of ideas we dislike in the name of safety".

It's all very tribal and it all leaves little room for disagreement. It's specially funny for people coming from outside the US/Europe when we get told how we are represented and to "stfu" if we actually have an opinion that is not welcome.

I really wish Mozilla would focus on Firefox.

This! Yes. Please

I don’t use Firefox much, but when I do the first thing I do is go to settings and uncheck “let Firefox install and run studies.”

It’s good they have that option. Even though they are to good guys, I find it creepy they would run studies on people without consent. Hopefully they don’t do creepy stuff like that on the fediverse, but honestly the whole thing with pocket makes me doubt their intentions. They seem to talk the talk, but then do creepy stuff in the background.

I wonder if I could join the fediverse with my own mastodon (Or diaspora or whatever) on my own domain, just like a personal email server. Or would that be much more complicated? Never looked into it but if I do I I'd like to be totally self-managed.

Yes you can. That’s one of the main ideas of it

Plenty of people do exactly this. I think one side effect is you wouldn't be as discoverable, if you cared about that. No less than just hosting a blog site of your own, but even that has SEO possibilities.

Yes, you definitely can, however running your own instance is not an out of the box process currently.

For sure you can, and also you really should if you are able to. If you are going to use the server by yourself only, you may also consider going with something easier on resources like GoToSocial instead of the fully-fledged Mastodon server.

Thanks for the heads-up on GoToSocial! I'll try it.

Thanks for mentioning GoToSocial! I didn't know this one.

I just setup a mastodon instance on a vps with my own domain. It was a fun evening project, I just followed mastodon's documentation along with a few supplemental searches. I'd say initial setup is pretty simple, tbd on upkeep ;)

I just wish you could have you own domain while not hosting an instance, like just pointing your DNS records at an email server hosted by somebody else.

Unless I'm reading your reply incorrectly, you absolutely could do the same thing. (You are referring to managed hosting solutions, right?)

https://growyourown.services/making-your-own-mastodon-server...

This website has some instructions and pointers that might be helpful.

The way I read it it's more like wanting to be able to present as user@mycustomdomain.com without having to have your own instance and retaining the ability to move between providers. Sorta like pointing your domain at Google Workplace for a few bucks a month.

Absolutely doable and it's a fun exercise. Mastodon is probably overkill for a single-user instance, there are other ActivityPub services that do not need Postgres+Redis+Ruby etc (pleroma, microblog...).

ps: as I found out while setting up my own server, diaspora is its own thing, it can't federate with ActivityPub services.

Oh I thought diaspora was part of fediverse. It's listed on https://fediverse.party so I assumed it could do ActivityPub. Guessed wrong, thanks for correcting me!

I’d like to see federated platforms do to Social media companies, what streaming has done to the entertainment industry.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter are nothing more than ML driven data collectors at this point.

Obviously content is king, the average user wants their Instagram stars or whatever, they aren’t concerned with politics.

But I’m optimistic to a major schism in ALL these mediocre platforms.

I want to see more corporations hosting their own, Chik Fil A, BestBuy, anything to break the tide.

Its wishful thinking, or just some feelgood morality piece.. I don't know, any way its just fluff. This idea is flawed from the start, if you make a less addicting cigarettes its never going to replace cigarettes in an open market, because it will have less demand. If you make a social service that promotes you living a healthy life it will not generate the same demand, its just the dynamic of the system.

I find this disappointing. The world does not need alternative social media. Everything in our society is geared towards "Bigger, Faster, Broader === Better!". But it has completely ignored humanity and quality. The world needs less social media, full stop. Devoting resources to this is is a waste of time. In my opinion (and I recognize the irony of posting this online) fewer people deserve an audience. Fewer people (and companies) should be given a platform. Fewer hours should be drowned in the cesspools that are online communities. Fewer eyeballs on the internet is what we should be aiming for.

The internet, and especially social media, is a great disruptor. A disruptor of community. Sure, it creates fluidity and eases the ability to interact. This is not really a positive, as a whole. Neutral at best. Efforts should instead be focused on fostering actual, face-to-face interactions. Online 'communities' are a disgustingly poor facsimile of interactions in the flesh. I mean, seriously, look what we've sacrificed. All for what? Phones that bombard us with notifications that someone said the content we posted was shit? Ads being shoved down our throats to try to monetize the activity of simply existing? Having the ability to leave racist comments on Youtube while you're taking a shit?

I'm an atheist, but I have remarked to my dad that I somewhat mourn both the loss of religious centers and offices. They formed critical venues for actually meeting people, humanizing and understanding them, building relationships and friendships, discussing differences with immediate realization of consequence for ones words/actions. The internet is a fucking disgrace compared to that.

Mozilla should build a series of cafes or something, in small-to-medium towns and cities. Foster actual, face-to-face, unscalable human connection. An unrealistic expectation, for sure. But goddamn could the world use some of that these days.

How about exploring how ignoring users causes rapid losses in browser market share?

It feels like Mozilla does EVERYTHING except improving Firefox.

Just this evening I was complaining to a friend that top show 150% CPU usage for Firefox and I don't know the reason because both about:performance and about:processes are useless. They weren't telling me look this horrible site is using up your CPU. My friend's response? Use Chromium.

Try the profiler. https://profiler.firefox.com/docs/#/./guide-getting-started?...

If I'm not mistaking that's for investigating a single tab, while I have thousands of tabs with various websites.

That can profile the whole browser as a unit. It does try to record only active threads. There are ways to set it to record everything. https://chat.mozilla.org/?#/room/#perfteam:mozilla.org is good place to access the people who know more about the profiler than I.

Do we need this same type of comment on every single post about Mozilla/Firefox? Does it not get tiring after a while? Because they are definitely tiring to read.

Well, the comment is about Firefox not improving their browser and instead doing other things; I imagine the comments will continue until Firefox commits to improving their browser instead of doing other things.

Firefox is obviously being improved all the time, and also obviously an org can do many different things at the same time. Yet you still have a fire hose of these comments on every Mozilla/Firefox thread.

Like, what do these commenters think they're doing? Just venting that their pet issues of FOSS isn't being worked on? What's that supposed to accomplish? What normal human being reads such a comment and goes like 'oh yeah thanks rude asshole commenters, I get right on fixing that!'??

I don't want HN threads to be just endlessly and breathlessly complaining about people not doing shit they want. Pay up or do it yourself.

It is as close to an intervention as we can come. We are friends of firefox, yet again reminding it that we love it, but all love has limits, and Firefox is approaching the limits of our love. If it does not change its direction soon, it will be all alone out in the cold.

What’s tiring for some of us is seeing Mozilla make several announcements a year about projects nobody cares about except whoever came up with the idea and their social circle. From the outside the organization seems to be full of people looking to use the resources of a non-profit to launch something, valuable or not, then use the name recognition on their CV as a springboard.

Tbh, I'm not really sure what you mean. The Firefox browser seems really solid. It passes most all benchmarks on WPT. It's also very focused on compatibility which chrome and safari often have problems with. There's plenty of stuff (e.g. grid) that they've been ahead of the curve on. As a developer I can also say that the FF devtools are by far my favorite to use

What exactly is the issue with FF? I think their loss of market share has a lot more to do with exactly the stuff you're telling them not to focus on. The competitors have OSes (e.g. macOS, Android, Windows, ChromeOS) that heavily push defaults or sometimes even force it (e.g. iOS).

For browsers like FF, Opera, or Brave, there's already a bar of people having to go out of their way to download them. They have a "third party" feel to them

Firefox is doomed to fail no matter what. FF succeeded because built in browsers sucked. Now they don’t suck so users have no reason to switch them.

Built-in browsers will suck again. It's kind of inevitable. Look at Chrome and manifest v3. Inevitably what happens when a company has such a strong monopoly is a recession or downturn comes along and the first thing they cut/deprioritize is the thing they see no threat in losing market dominance in

Here we all are, talking on a heavily moderated forum that is meant to increase civility and reduce noise. If you think Mozilla's idea is bad, why are you here?

Because they're supposed to be working on their browser, not dicking around with social media.

Seems like they've been doing a lot of work on their browser. Definitely kept up with Chrome and Safari at least:

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable

What exactly is the issue? I don't think just throwing more money or people at that specific work would increase velocity. At a certain point you get too many cooks in the kitchen

I think a lot of people are still disappointed that for example servo didn't make it to it's endgoal and the team behind it mostly got fired whilst the CEO increases her compensation, the board expands and money is given to things like letting artists examine ai impact. They want it to outperform chromium browsers instead of implementing 3 separate ways to save tabs across devices.

They want firefox to keep up in marketshare because it can keep as much as you want on your scoreboard... If it isn't used it ends up useless, dead and without a hand in webstandards. I still remember how many users it lost because google could switch video compression standards last second because ff could just be ignored leading to countless peers blaming firefox for being laggy with youtube open.

It's worse now.

Presumably, they are planning to get revenue from this instead of having it be a charity.

The community here is good in spite of, not because of, the moderation. The dang-era changes to "increase civility" have predictably lowered the quality of discussion - just look at threads from 10 or even 5 years ago and compare it to the barely-better-than-Reddit discussion we see now. For now there's still some legacy of the good old days to be found here, but I don't expect to stay much longer.

Hasn’t social media moved on from publicly posting with strangers? Of the 2bn people who engage with each other on a regular basis, surely almost all of this is done in private (WhatsApp, Insta, Slack, FB Groups)?

While I don’t need an “open global fediverse” I do need tools to construct my own private spaces to which I can invite others: company chat, neighbours, family, friends. I guess the old problem of who gets to be admin is even thornier when “being admin” doesn’t just mean being able to choose a new background image, but also managing the actual software instance.

Hopefully these are the problems Mozilla will tackle. Twitter v2 isn’t going to be useful to anyone but the 1% of the 1% that engage in public.

Mozilla is trying to stay relevant, and they're trying to gain some relevance by making a big announcement that they're opening their own mastodon instance (1), and also brag about how much of a "big deal" Mozilla is (2). The "healthy social media alternative" is vaporware and just an excuse for all of this.

[1] "In early 2023, Mozilla will stand up and test a publicly accessible instance in the Fediverse at Mozilla.Social"

[2] "Mozilla has a quarter-century track record of world-class open development"

As if I needed yet another place to have information tied to me out on the public searchable internet.

Have you looked at Aether?

This feels about as likely as a beauty contest winner actually creating world peace.

Humans are hard. If all it took to create a healthy community was vauge sentiment, we would have solved the world's problems already.

Its not like toxic group dynamics is a new thing, people have been trying and failing to solve this problem since the dawn of time.

If mozilla had some actual ideas to test out that'd be one thing, but i don't see that they are actually proposing anything.

I imagine the reason they are so keen to be a player in social media is because someone at Mozilla really pushes the idea that there is a community around Firefox (sure, Thunderbird, MDN, etc). There is no community. People who use a browser are not a community: we don't need a place to "hang out" because we all use Firefox. It's a ridiculous aspirational thinking that only moves Mozilla further into irrelevancy.

We really missed the boat on having something like “Craigslist for talking to friends and neighbors” launch decades ago.

Just something unsexy that works and can stick around in the same form because the owner is a curmudgeon with out any dreams of grandeur.

Perhaps the could never have happened to social media though because it was too hot a space.

Everything else seems doomed to get caught up in this race to capture a billion eyeballs and wallets.

I think the problem was that listserves soaked that up early on and when people moved it was either go Facebook or even worse places like Nextdoor. There are other services - groups.io is popular around here - but the trick is bootstrapping a community when the ad company is right there with so much free stuff.

>We really missed the boat on having something like “Craigslist for talking to friends and neighbors” launch decades ago.

This sounds a lot like Nextdoor. The results haven't been pretty.

All the bits and pieces have been around for decades. Usenet could easily have functioned as a marketplace, local gossip and information board, with proper segmentation. It's decentralized, there where numerous clients available, there just weren't enough users.

It worked reasonably well for my university when I started 25 years ago, but it deteriorated quickly during the yearly 2000s.

We also had forums, blogs and RSS. All technologies when combined provide a decentralized social media like experience. I think it was a healthier approach, but more segmented. Modern social media attempts to fit everything into a framework. From a financial perspective, it seems to work, but socially I'm not convinced.

One of the thing that have impressed me is how willing people are to express repulsive behaviour, under their real name. You'd think that Facebooks real name policy would make help regulate behaviour, but it truly doesn't.

Two things are required for healthy social media:

1. A system of incentives that align with positive behavior.

2. Leadership that corrects both behavior and systemic issues, to encourage healthy behavior.

The largest social media companies now largely ignore both of those issues. They systematically encourage negative behavior, while abdicating any real leadership, in terms of ensuring a positive environment for participants.

The main problem with Mozilla's initiative is that it presupposes a definition of what's "healthy". This won't be popular with some of the progressive set here, but for many people, being exposed to a freewheeling landscape of ideas that aren't censored or controlled based on their "correctness" or evidence base is a wonderful thing.

The simple knowledge that even the crazy and unfounded can be allowed to express itself so that really interesting notions, connections and concepts can filter their way forward can be satisfying for many reasons, aside from moral questions of free expression. Prima facie, nobody can easily know what good ideas vs- bad ideas are, or where exactly good will evolve from crazy notions. The freedom to express is a fundamental step in discovering that.

I consider a place that allows it to be much less "toxic" than some stultifying, taboo-ridden supposedly healthy social landscape in which you get canceled or burned for going against some dominant grain of thought or any tangent of it, or for violating the dictates of some vocal minority that can't stand divergent thought but shields itself in labels of being "tolerant and diverse" or rational. Often, as we've all seen in recent years and since long before, such people are none of those things, but suffocate the real expression of many unique arguments.

Sure, many people in such an openly permissive and genuinely tolerant environment will engage in flame wars, bad faith argument, drama and all kinds of stupid bullshit and terrible thinking, but it will open room for interesting thinking to filter forward to those who can make better sense of it, without censoring others.

Many of history's best breeding grounds for incredibly creative thinking were places where free expression was raucously, tacitly cultivated in all its sometimes supposedly toxic glory of the stupid and mean sharing space with the thoughtful.

I just wanted to say, I spent time and thought in composing a comment only to for HN to tell me I am posting too fast (2 comments within 10 min and I spent 10min or so composing the comment).

@dang, this sucks, it is very mean and unkind. If you want to ban users go ahead, if someone is posting too fast let them know before you block them from posting for many hours (mobile browser makes waiting to post impossible at times, i waited so long I couldn't get back to the comment) this has happened many times. Be clear and direct with auto-moderation please.

I will keep complaining like this when it happens unless it is against the rules (it isn't from what I can see).

You can do what yoh want with me or this site, whether not I broke any rules (been in your shoes), I have no complaints about that and I keep posting with or without upvotes so I don't care about "karma" either but either I am allowed to participate here or I am not. This sucks!

Good, maybe they'll use their deep rust experience to pick up https://github.com/rustodon/rustodon#readme and drive it forward, or make their own if AGPL is incompatible with the Mozilla licensing infrastructure (I don't know)

The only thing Mozilla has deep experience in is creating a cult of people that believe they are still trying to do good.

Ok, so suppose I've got a spare RPI sitting around.

Let's say I want to post text for a few people who follow me, and follow a handful of other accounts on mastodon or whatever.

What is the absolute minimum I'd need to connect to "the fediverse?" Is there a CLI thingy I can just run to fetch posts, or to create posts?

You need an always online instance that can be federated if you want to own your identity and social graph. If you don't care about that, then you can just create an account in your instance of choice and then use a wide range of tools to post and retrieve content (including a CLI I believe).

When the model switched from giving people a way to share ideas, thoughts, photos, videos to corporate news and content distribution, social media lost its way. Just give me a way to quickly get rid of people I don't want to hear from. Stop force feeding me content. I'm here to share.

For years people with contrarian political views were rushing to mastodon after getting deplatformed from Twitter (sometimes, as we now know, via reports by the FBI for violating “disinformation” rules.) Mozilla was not promoting decentralized social media then, but should have been. It’s too bad they are only taking this position once it is appealing to those who now want to leave Twitter because it’s no longer permabanning people due to their political views.

At some point everyone just has to learn to be better people and focus their attention on positive content online.

It took humans thousands of years just to be civilised in a physical society. Hopefully it's faster online.

Unfortunately, Mozilla has become too politicized in the past several years for them to be productive in this area.

They also have a habit of shutting down projects that aren't immediately as successful as Firefox.

Social media should push people, but not towards face, towards social status, instead more towards the self-proclaimed goals and towards creations.

Example: I want to become good at wood working.Social media should reward me looking at courses, buying tools, getting started and posting even initial steps. It should encourage me when i fail, coax me back towards my endavour and prevent procrastination, even invite people to look at the results and find me mentors.

The ideal social media, is the one that is not needed after its done.

I'm hopeful some nonprofit Signal/wikipedia-esque alternatives spring up to eventually replace the likes of Twitter, Facebook, etc. The incentives are just too messed up in the ad-driven model.

Some of the collective insanity of the last decade or so was no doubt just human nature, but these companies pushed all the levers they could to maximize it. A platform with a little human goodness that finds ways to encourage our best qualities could be a powerful force.

I hope they work on a less-toxic gpt-chat alternative next. And a positive replacement for whatever SBF's company did. Anything I'm missing?

> One that elevates critical thinking and reasoned argument, that honors shared experience and individual expression and brings together diverse and global communities to work together for the common good.

That sounds like how the Rationalists do things (stuff like TheMotte and "effective altruism").

I don't think it's really caught on with the wider population.

These initiatives, even in the best case are only likely to subset people with "healthy" interests as opposed to changing what the discourse on twitter or facebook is.

A lot of the online conflicts are downstream of the socio/economic/cultural realities that people deal with.

So are we finally getting Google+ back?

Or another Twitter clone?

That said, when it comes to Mozilla I'd prefer if they fix some long standing issues on the browser, from the top of my head:

- fix the API so I can use Tree Style Tabs without crazy hacks again.

- fix the dev tools so it copies the full token even if it has been shortened in the UI.

I am pretty sure all form of public social media is toxic. If you give people:

1. a platform to speak their mind (basically can type anything) 2. is public (as opposed to private like Discord servers)

then you will get everything bad about social media even without the for-profit incentives.

Yes, with one caveat: without algorithmic feeds users tend to form natural circles just like in real life. This dramatically reduces toxicity. Just let people post whatever they want and follow whoever they want. If a social media company will not attempt to mix and promote random high engagement content, users will far less likely discover it by themselves and engage in toxic behavior.

I have to say, I think nostr shows a lot of promise. I think there is something special there.

Agree. Furthermore, the fact that basically anyone can run their own relay makes it very decentralized.

Wonder if they'll let a backdoor access to intelligence agencies like the other did.

User since ancient times here: just make a good browser and a good mail client. Figure out a sustainable business model. Skip the rest.

Human interaction mediated by high-leverage technology will always yield disaster.

English culture (and hence, modern social media) is adversarial in nature, what we need is people to become better at arguing, not have less of it.

Mozilla needs to get their shit together.

I had my internship offer signed by Brendan Eich. At the time I was a closeted first generation PhD student who only did a PhD because it paid about the same as being a pizza delivery driver with slightly better hours and benefits, but I nearly turned it down because I was on the verge of dropping out and travelling the world like I'd dreamed for a long time, and I wish I had, they ratfucked me.

By the time I got there, they had cancelled the project I was going to work on. I designed a UX research study all on my own, and my main feedback from my managers (plural -- one who oversaw the project and another who oversaw the day to day in the SF office since they didn't trust the interns to not just smoke trees on the roof all day and run roughshod over the Castro all night, which had happened enough times they had to institute "A Policy")

Imagine every day, going into work desperate to stay in California, as your "manager" takes everyone but you out to lunch, and your other "manager" often shows up to meetings an hour plus late with excuses like they "went jogging" as he casually mentions he doesn't even use Firefox outside work.

Apparently I pissed off a bunch of senior people by loudly declaring rather than waste money on the doomed venture that was FireOS, they should focus on the memory leaks that were driving people to Chrome. (Which in turn, would give Google leverage to reduce the money given via the search bar placement they paid for, which was pretty much the sole source of income for the company.)

What I'd hoped would happen is I'd get hired at Mozilla or somewhere else in the Bay that summer.

Instead, it was the beginning of the end, and not just for my dreams of Californication or whatever -- Google moved into the same building around that time and started poaching people with cutesey social media posts about cakes and shit to cover inviting the engineers over.

Within one CFAA expiration of that summer, I'd be sitting on K Street with a letter opener on my desk because they were too cheap to have anything but a short conversation about the exits after Charlie Hebdo.

(You haven't truly lived until you tell some powerful person's kid who just made a transphobic comment that this isn't a stepping stone to Google or a high school and they need to watch their fucking mouth, then watched their eyes go wide and hands shake as they try to stand between you and your desk because they know in that moment how few fucks you have left to give.)

Anyways, sorry to ramble -- I studied English Lit as one of my minors, so sometimes I post too hard when I have an all day migraine like the one I've had today, after I hit "add comment" on this I'm probably gonna go puke in the bathroom.

Mozilla is great, on a technical level, but anything in the realm of social informatics should be left to others, the company is dying because of their repeated failures on these issues stemming back to when they killed Persona[1].

Companies like Google and Facebook have abused their access to knowing whose nyms are whom, and not just to target them with bullshit advertising that induces psychic harms and delivers malvertising, but Mozilla is rotting from the inside out and has been for some time.

I met some great people that Summer after Snowden, but the good ones have almost all... moved on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona

With how political Mozilla is I highly doubt they will make a non-toxic platform.

One word: MySpace

JustBecauseYouUsePascalCaseDoesntMakeItASingleWord

Mozilla to explore healthy cigarette smoking..

remember Flock?

[deleted]

That's Mozilla for you.

Elon Musk bought Twitter so a "healthy social media alternative" is needed, one in which you should get "cancelled" if you disagree with the notion that "vociferous minorities" should be able to change the generally accepted meanings of words.

OMG that's Steve Texeira!! How did he go from being an evangelist and writing excellent books on the unmatched RAD IDE known as Delphi, to indulging in "Wokespeak" on behalf of Mozilla?

I wonder if Mozilla needs to be given the Elon treatment too. Getting rid of everyone except those responsible for the core browser functionality might be a good start.

The sad fate of mozilla, they are reaching new lows trying to find room by surfing on the buzz

After firing so many of their browser, browser engine, and docs employees to ensure their CEO got a bonus I don't really trust either the motive or the longevity of this.

I'm old enough to remember when Mozilla installed malware into browsers across the world just so they could show ads. That's as creepy or worse than what facebook has done. I'm not credulous enough to think that a company will violate user trust that way knows the first thing about creating healthy communities.

Maybe Mozilla should focus on building a better browser for the masses and making money by themselves and not relying on Google's money as they once promised 14 years ago [0], rather than chasing costly distractions and fantasies like this with their already shrinking market share. [1][2][3]

Firefox (really) has nothing to offer, and the chronic decrease in users shows that it is only going down as Edge has already over taken it and Mozilla did that by themselves.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

[3] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

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