Mozilla.social mastodon waitlist
mozilla.social
mozilla.social
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.
They even have an email client already (Thunderbird).
(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.)
Source: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2021/a...
So, while it has a lot of money, it's really at its heart a foundation, not a corporation.
https://www-archive.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-arti...
> 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.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
I don't think the word "corporation" in "non-profit corporation" means much of anything as long as it has its non-profit status.
Most non-person legal entities will be a corporation or other similar structure.
An analogy would be if you make a browser, to use standard HTML and HTTP, not try to invent your own thing.
...how?
Why? I don't want companies on the internet to know who I am, or that I am even a single unique person.
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.
I love the sibling comment about Sandstorm too.
I absolutely, completely disagree. I wish social media websites were controlled by foundations in the same way Wikipedia is.
Maybe it's too late, but it's worth trying. Stuff like this improves their reputation with me, not the opposite.
The problem isn't the idea; it's that all they did was throw their logo on it and swap out auth.
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.
Social network are one of the largest problem of the internet right now. A reputable host for the decentralized web is really good and cheap.
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.
Full list of changes here:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/compare/main...MozillaS...
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...
This is possible, I had good results with https://github.com/NilsIrl/MozWire
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.
I know I can copy-paste @username@mozilla.social in my instance's search box but I prefer the button, when it's available.
Hmm
Right now, it seems they're doing invite only so they can moderately control the load and keep track so everything keeps running.
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).
The vivaldi.social instance also has a large Japanese contingent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This sounds fine without context, but according to wokeists, misgendering someone is “advocating for violence” and criticizing Islam is “racism”, for example.
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.
i think its precisely the opposite.
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.
Mastodon is happy in the niche its found for itself
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.
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.)
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.
ERROR: MastoHttpRateLimitError: Too many requestsBus 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.
Am I supposed to join a waitlist for this specific instance? Feels like too much of a hassle for almost no reward.
Meanwhile, Firefox Mobile is still half broken.
> 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.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/09/27/test-firefox-andr...
Just use Twitter for the "one" platform instead of intentionally locking yourself to a bubble. Twitter hasn't gone anywhere.
The domain name hasn't changed, so in some sense it's the same as it always was.
I guess MySpace and Digg are just as healthy as they've always been. Domain names are the same, so no need for nuance about anything else.
I don't use the site myself so I don't know what redirects are in place, but most links people send me are now x.com rather than twitter.com
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.
- TikTok (#11)
- Instagram (#12)
- Facebook (#18)
- Threads (#25)
- X (#123)
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.
[1] https://github.com/travisbrown/blue
[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/twitters-ad-revenue-has-s...
Here's some real data: https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/t...
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.
It's a statistical estimation similar to TV ratings. App Store positions are accurate.
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.
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).
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.
what twitter are you using today where the opinionated people have left
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.
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.
It sets a good example for social networks and the idea of choosing a server which matches your preferred level of moderation seems workable.
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.
> ... 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