Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future | Hacker News Reader

Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future

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107 pointscpeterso102 comments

"We want people to have choice and agency"

I think this fundamentally misdiagnoses the root of the issue, post 2016-election. People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc), and existing social media companies are exceptionally good at figuring out how to show them more of the content they want. The problem is when it shows users content that they want but others don't want them to see, and in our current political environment there is no consensus on where the line is between being a responsible steward and censorship.

Put it a different way, if Truth Social had taken off users would have had "more choice" of social networks. Would the Mozilla leadership have considered that a good outcome?

Mozilla also put out a blogpost title "We need more than deplatforming"

Seems they only care about choices when they are choices they agree with.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

The 'more' in that post was:

- Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.

- Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.

- Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.

- Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.

> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.

Ah, yes, reinforce the status quo by diminishing or silencing the dissidents. That's never gone poorly.

It's content moderation, of course there's a wrong way to do it. There is also such thing as objective fact and falsehood.

That about sums it up honestly, this is the hard problem of the information age and there's no easy answers. Which is why it's so frustrating to see people arguing for totally unrestricted speech, I completely understand the desire, if it worked that would be ideal. But taking this stance requires plugging your ears to the harms and the fact that the lizard brain is not prepared for this. You are not immune to propaganda, to advertising, to emotional manipulation, to disinformation -- no one is. And the certainty that you are is what makes you vulnerable to it. You become your own conman and convince yourself. Being clever and persuasive is a detriment because you deploy all the logic and reason at your disposal to against yourself and your guard is down because the call is coming from inside the house.

This shit is only gonna get worse, the internet isn't getting smaller and the attacks are getting larger and more sophisticated. I genuinely don't know what the right course is because even education isn't it. A defense against the dark arts class won't do it because knowing how it works only helps a little in identifying when it's happening to you. People who join cults know they're in cults and it doesn't stop them. You still need the deprogramming after. This whole situation is awful and one giant mess.

> People have plenty control over what content they see

I think this is naive, and the overall comment is equally ideological as you're accusing mozilla as being.

Advertiser-funded social networks will always have incentives that are misaligned with users. They want to optimise for impressions so they can drive more views. It's been demonstrated so often that social networks optimise for engagement bait - putting content that drives hate clicks in timelines - to juice engagment numbers and get more ad views.

Decentralised and ad-free are distinct qualities of a social network, but they do work hand-in-hand to produce a pro-user network. It is harder for a decentralised modal to make an anti-user change because everyone else can work against them - we saw this to an extent with third party twitter accounts not having the algorithmic timeline.

> Advertiser-funded social networks will always have incentives that are misaligned with users.

That's fair, and to clarify I am not saying that users have complete control. My point is just that looking back on the last 7(!) years of discourse about the ills of social media (misinformation, radicalization, polarization, mental health toll), I don't really see how control or choice would help?

> comment is equally ideological as you're accusing mozilla as being I'm not sure I completely followed this part, but to be clear I'm not advocating for or against an ideology re: Truth Social. I'm just saying that it feels like a counter example to their position that choice is a solution.

Social networks boost misinformation, radicalization, and polarization because they actively promote content that engagement, which gets them more ad impressions.

That's true, but misinformation, radicalization and polarization also may occur for ideological reasons. Mozilla would not allow everybody with all points of view to use their own fediverse instances; they'll block people they find reprehensible. Those people will then go to another instance, which mutually block each other. Now you've reinvented radicalization and polarization without a profit motive.

There's a large difference between people choosing more or less private clubs and FB tuning their feeds to promote conflict.

Two very different kind of systems can produce very similar results. "people choosing more or less private clubs" is an apt description of many fringe religions / cults which eject people who question the narrative and tell their adherents to cut off friends and family who aren't in the group. The Jehovah's Witnesses come to mind in particular, they're very different from Facebook but they nonetheless polarize and radicalize people.

Private clubs are not necessarily bad, but ideally they should moderate for basic decorum. If they moderate for ideological alignment, they frequently become radicalization machines; echo chambers where people get their biases reinforced without being challenged.

What happens on Facebook is much less legible compared to the effects of organized religion.

But perhaps only because it's so new ? (Parallels with the printing press => Protestantism and other propaganda come to mind again...)

While I agree that ideological reasons will exist in any medium, I think you're proposing an equivalence between the solutions that is made up. Only people with 100% ideological bent will take the actions you suggest; the rest are likely to have many different interests that happen to span purely ideological boundaries, and they will want to remain engaged with those interests such that they avoid finding themselves roped into a place where they only associate with the extreme ideological outliers.

I think you see this in the various ideologically-driven twitterlikes, which have succeeded in only really capturing the extremes and have not made a dent in the mainstream.

I will note that this already had happened with Mastodon when Gab decided to "join" :

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...

Notice the different reaction of various instance admins and client developers.

From what I have heard, since then Gab broke compatibility with other Mastodon instances ?

So the crisis was dealt with reasonably well for all involved ?

(Truth Social is also based on Mastodon.)

Yeah the behavior of instance blocking is an inevitability for these systems. This creates the conditions for those nearer to or already at the extremes to self-select out of the mainstream by choosing to join already radicalized networks.

I think this instance-level blocking helps contain overall radicalization tho, versus the more pernicious radicalizing via mainstream social networks. Basically I don't see them as equivalent in effect, which was the point I was making.

non ad funded social networks will still have the issue that "influencers" want followers and clickbait hate topics will get them more.

> > > People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc),

then

> I don't really see how control or choice would help?

It's possible that someone has some X but could still use more of X.

While users have a lot of "control over what content they see", there's also far more hidden; IOW, users could have additional control and choice.

As an example, "social media" services often promote two-way blocking over one-way blocking (e.g. "muting"), or may not even offer one-way blocking. This means that if I tire of John Smith and "block" him, he's likely to be unable to read anything I've written before or write in the future. That's poor control for users. (Especially if I continue to smear John Smith after I've blocked him.)

Services often censor discovery, even absent a block: a post may be only accessible via direct link and cannot be found via search or user re-posting.

> social media companies are exceptionally good at figuring out how to show them more of the content they want

We have no way of knowing if that’s true. Social media companies show users what keeps them most profitably engaged with the site, and rely on the casual fallacy that engagement represents preference.

Decentralized, open networks do promise choice in a way that centralized corporate networks are unable to secure. That was as true for the future of Truth Social as it was for all the existing corporate networks.

Whether today’s most promising protocols for decentralized, open networks are going to be adequate and whether network effects are cohere on them is another matter. Mozilla seems more hopeful than myself.

> People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc)

Only if you factor in content blocking extensions. Otherwise, how do I get rid of inorganic "recommended" (promoted) content? How do I get rid of the "Trending", "Shorts", and "Top News" crap without an extension? And controls like youtube's "Don't recommend this channel" and downvoting don't actually prevent youtube from recommending those things again, the official controls given to users for controlling their recommendations are unreliable at best, if not outright placebos.

Youtube could implement these features properly but don't care to. Extensions like blocktube are the answer, but it shouldn't have to be this way.

> People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc), and existing social media companies are exceptionally good at figuring out how to show them more of the content they want.

Edward Teach (ie The Last Psychiatrist) has this concept that it's not what we want, but how we want that really matters.

We have the illusion that we have agency because there's so much variation in what we want, but when you look at how we want, it's all served up in the same way. He uses porn as an example, where you can have any fetish you want, but how you fulfill that want is by scrolling though "content" on one of a handful of near-identical websites.

It applies equally so news and social media. The "what" is diverse, the "how" is hegemonic.

>existing social media companies are exceptionally good at figuring out how to show them more of the content they want

I don't want to see what I want. I want to see what I choose. These are not always the same thing.

I want control over my own life. It doesn't matter how benevolent the dictator or how well they know me. It's not their business to choose what I see.

> People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc)

Ehh… I'd argue those tools provide an illusory and superficial level of control. Follows and similar… Don't really work these days from what I hear, and blocks, etc. are specific to individual pieces of content. The algorithmic feeds are still working away, and tilt the entire range of content that users are exposed to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...

E.G. Do most (2018) Youtube users even know that the platform is constantly and actively (if inadvertently) trying to radicalize them? Or do they just assume they see the same things as most other people, not think about it too much, let it fade into the background, and accept it as normal? Hard to have choice and agency when you're not even aware of the ways that the much larger and more powerful entity is trying to manipulate you.

We evolved to generally think that what we see is a representative sample of what actually is. When instead what we see is a constantly shifting funhouse designed to maximize clicks and ads by profiling us individually, the information asymmetry between the platforms pushing the "content" and the users consuming it makes it hard for me to believe that users even meaningfully consented to the situation, much less "have plenty control over" it.

Which makes the way that threads are shown and transparency about how those programs decide to show them even more important : they work very differently on a RSS feed, Hacker News, Xitter, Mastodon, YouTube, Facebook !

> Put it a different way, if Truth Social had taken off users would have had "more choice" of social networks. Would the Mozilla leadership have considered that a good outcome?

Mitchell Baker - Mozilla's activist CEO - already answered your somewhat rhetorical question when she insisted "we need more than deplatforming" [1].

I'm all for decentralisation and I include decentralisation from an organisation like Mozilla in that drive. Why does Firefox sync insist on centralising authentication and authorisation? Why was the possibility to run your own FF sync server without any external dependencies on Mozilla-hosted services removed? Given that Mozilla has become more and more politicised it is not unlikely that Baker will insist on doing "more than deplatforming" to those accounts which do not fit her ideology.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

Yeah I wish they'd fix the sync server or release the new one they are still working on. They really don't want us to host our own data :(

> Given that Mozilla has become more and more politicised it is not unlikely that Baker will insist on doing "more than deplatforming" to those accounts which do not fit her ideology.

Mozilla has been quite clear that they are censorious. From their Mozilla.Social "content policies":

"To ensure an inclusive and safe environment, hate speech and derogatory language is not permitted on Mozilla.Social."

How is "hate speech" defined? Broadly. Moreover, Mozilla recommends people self-censor:

"Simply put, if you’re unsure if a word is derogatory, don’t use it."

They have similar language in their "Harassment" section:

"If you are not sure whether a behavior would constitute harassment, it’s best to avoid that behavior."

And if that was unclear:

"If you are looking for a social network that permits all speech, without limitation, Mozilla.Social may not be the right place for you."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/soci...

FYI, both Truth Social and Gab are based on Mastodon :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28959468

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...

(No idea how much they are still technically Fediverse-compatible ?)

The problem is that signs and that which they signify have becomes so far removed from one another that Pepe the Frog, The Pope, the OK hand signal and the purple teletubbie can be in a state of superposition with regards to meaning. This is a direct result of our ever increasing mediated existence.

The true meaning of a thing is dependent on the actions taken in response, cribbing Wittgenstein to bits.

Take a look at the actions people take while interacting with social media. Clicking, scrolling, sitting and staring at a screen while synchronized pixels entertain or enrage. That’s the entirety of the true meaning. Fictions are of course applied on top as the existential dread of being reduced to a servomechanism is too hard to bear.

The only solution is a conscious effort to engage in object-level reality and to deny the power of these increasingly amplified messages to form what you would consider truths about the world around you.

Is this a broad scale trend or is it just the only 5 videos of X outrage on the planet?

Which of Mozilla's "bets" ever remotely panned put?

The only thing they got going for them, wasn't even an official bet by Mozilla, they were making the crappy bloated broswer + suite, and some community members created Firefox (then Phoenix).

They should focus 100% on regaining browser market share and innovating on the browser space, instead of the numerous diversions. Of course as long as the C-team is paid handsomnly while driving Firefox to the ground, and Google pays them, they won't care.

Idk, Rust seems to be working out. Thunderbird is working as well.

Rust is a Linux Foundation project, and the process of adding more Rust code to Firefox is (to my knowledge) less of a priority. I love Firefox, but Mozilla enjoys shooting itself in the foot too much.

Rust was created by a Mozilla employee and sponsored by Mozilla, and Mozilla was the debatably the most significant organization-level contributor to the project from 2006 through 2020.

Rust is not a Linux Foundation project. The Rust Foundation is its own foundation.

If you will permit me to tout things I worked on while there, Opus seems to have been pretty successful? The final story has not yet been written on AV1, but it is still the best chance we have had for a royalty-free video format and thanks to YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, etc. now makes up a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. That ought to be enough to get it over the "ever remotely panned out" bar. I find myself using WebRTC quite a bit these days, too, so happy to have been a (small) part of that.

That’s another great example, thank you.

>Idk, Rust seems to be working out.

Rust was created to write a new rendering engine in, which they abandoned half-way. Then they abandoned Rust itself.

And, guess what, they also abandoned Thunderbird:

"Thunderbird has been independent since 2012. See https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi... Many people have not realized this, but for Thunderbird to grow and adapt to a changing environment having some sort of income stream is important. There is a limit to what the volunteers can do. Hence significant fund raising efforts. The web site perhaps answers the current arrangement best. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/ One of the issues we face is that people in general do not differentiate between Mozilla co the commercial entity that produces Firefox and the Mozilla foundation that owns it. Thunderbird's arrangements are with the foundation, not the company."

I’m not sure why you feel my thunderbird point is invalid. The parent post on this thread didn’t specify which Mozilla entity they were talking about, so I interpreted it is all of them generally. Mozilla Foundation owns MZLA which pays for developers of Thunderbird. I don’t see that as Mozilla (collectively) abandoning Thunderbird. They just changed the fundraising umbrella.

My experience is that the crap began with Firefox, Mozilla (the browser) was much better in terms of interface, and it felt better with xul (more control, much less bloat vs. Firefox + Thunderbird) than without it

Firefox was originally created with XUL and was still using XUL until around 2019 when it was totally removed. And nobody really loved and preferred Mozilla the browser at the time Phoenix/Firefox came out, this is why it immediately got huge adoption, despite being unofficial for a good while.

The crap began with Mozilla leadership some years after Firefox - perhaps at the time of their mobile OS and smartphone efforts, but in general when starting to care more for getting the sweet Google cash and doing BS token attempts at anything they would "brainstorm" than being an actual player in the browser space.

I can assure you that PLENTY of people loved Mozilla and were pissed off by Firefox. I'm still astonished that it gained fans, anyhow their crappy behavior towards users, privacy etc clearly began at that point, from what I recall. That then it got worse and worse with the years, absolutely

Firefox was created by, and planned, and executed by people on Netscape's dime at first then on the Mozilla Foundation's dime.

There were a few really valuable volunteers that came later, PCH for example helped rewrite bookmarks before 1.0, but to suggest that Firefox just landed on Mozilla from "the community" is horse shit.

Firefox was a considered bet by Mozilla's leadership team in the summer of 2002. I know this because I was on Mozilla's leadership team and in the meeting where it was decided. It took place at a table outside of Netscape's building 21 after Mitchell'd been laid off but while a few of us still worked there to manage the Mozilla project.

The guy that started what would become Firefox, Ben Goodger (and who quickly abandoned it) was a Netscape employee. Like me, a couple years earlier he'd been hired by Netscape thanks to his Mozilla volunteering efforts. The guy that picked up the abandoned corpse and reanimated it was a Netscape intern named Blake Ross, a high school kid that I'd recruited into the Mozilla project as a volunteer. After Ben dropped it (perhaps to pursue Manticore, his .Net standalone browser project) Blake and I worked on it. Jason Kersey, another Mozilla volunteer that got a job at Netscape, contributed CSS and icons and gave us our first working theme I think (Remember mozillaZine? that was Jason, well, it was started by Chris Nelson, but Jason had mozBin, the place to go for binaries before Netscape/Mozilla provided them, well they joined forces for what most folks recall as mozillaZine's early years.)

A few of us worked on "m/b" for a couple months, you could find progress updates at my blog, and as summer got into full swing, a couple other members of the leadership team and myself, at an outdoor table at Netscape, pitched the larger group on moving away from the integrated application suite to what would become Firefox and Thunderbird. There were a few good reasons, but chief among them, I believe, in convincing Brendan and Mitchell, was that a failure of one could not tank the other as with the integrated suite. If we had a crasher in MailNews, it took down the Browser, the whole suite crashed, ugly. They were tightly coupled and with AOL in shut-down mode with Netscape, and resourcing in doubt, that was a risk that standalone apps wouldn't have. Also, if you didn't need mail, you didn't have to take on that shared UI overhead. Two .exes were better than one. There were other arguments made, Dave Hyatt, who was in that meeting as well, I think, advocated for "XUL done right" a clean user interface implementation without the Netscape compromises that made Mozilla and Netscape slower than need be. Dave created XUL, he was one of the architects of the cross platform toolkit that Mozilla adopted when it moved to NGLayout (Gecko). Well, staff@mozilla was convinced and we began planning the transition. A couple months later I shipped the first public version, Phoenix 0.1.

I may have a detail or two off here, but my point is I was there, an integral part of all of this, and Firefox was not "some community members" tossing something over a wall to a hapless Mozilla/Netscape. Firefox originated on Netscape's dime, by people Netscape harvested from the community, and Firefox's development up to v1.0, 95% of it anyway, was paid for by the Mozilla Foundation who employed Ben and Blake and me and others to take that prototype from a hobby project of a few Netscapers waiting for the axe, to a full product release with a strong and growing organization behind it.

Surely most of you know, but for those who don't, Dave and much of his Netscape team went to Apple and did Safari on KHTML and Ben and several other Mozilla and Netscape folks went to Google and did Chrome. Firefox was founded in part by some of the founders of Safari and Chrome. We all worked closely together for 2 or 3 years in the end-times at Netscape, a few of us a bit longer.

Were there volunteers that helped Firefox get to 1.0? Yes. For sure. Most of them were ex-Netcape(Mozilla) like Bryan Ryner, ex Netscaper who helped us go cross platform with Firefox. We had originally planned on Windows only with Camino on Mac and Galeon probably for Linux. Once we became the official Mozilla browser though we needed Mac and Linux support and bryner got those platforms standing up for us. We had two community contributed themes, before the Mozilla Foundation worked with artists and agencies to get a couple of professional themes. I mentioned Pierre Chanail's bookmkarks rewrite.

In the end, Firefox was a Mozilla project through and through. It originated as a pet project at Netscape, not "from the community" as you've suggested, and Mozilla adopted it almost immediately. Before it even had a name, when Dave, Blake, Ben, and I just called it "m/b" for mozilla/browser the cvs repo where it lived, Mozilla's leadership team, a group that included Dave and myself, were advocating for adopting it as the official browser. As Netscape was imploding and we were creating the life boat Mozilla Foundation, the few remaining Netscape employees and a few laid off or moved on ex-Netscapers kept it alive with the Phoenix 0.x release (I managed almost all of those) until the Mozilla Foundation was created where we went through a couple of quick name changes and it finally became Firefox. BTW, I believe Jason gets credit for the name Firefox. Not 100% sure but we were all at the same whiteboard and that's my memory.

I remember in 2011 looking into decentralized social networks. I didn't see the point since existing ones worked fine. Time has proven me wrong. The existing ones now don't let me control my feed, and they keep throwing unwanted notifications at me that I can't turn off.

Internet Identity Workshop -> Berkman Center + Berkeley 2005 :-(

Farcaster is doing pretty well https://www.farcaster.xyz/

I am 100% behind people-driven, federated social media. But their argument is a bit strange.

Because when you truly let the people decide what is politically correct to say online, we have already seen that bubbles are formed and borders are drawn. I don't know how many different fediverses there are out there, someone should do a project and try to map them.

But I can tell which bubble Mozilla wants to be in.

The best way to navigate the fediverse, as an instance operator, is to be completely apolitical. Even then people will hate you for not taking a stance, but I think you'll get away with a minimal amount of polarization.

In a federated social network, the "best" way to operate an instance is to be apolitical only if you want to be apolitical. But there is no mandate to do that.

The entire point of instance-based federation is that you can have "political"/biased/single-topic instances, and people that like that can chose to participate.

It must be acknowledged that most people do not want to hear from the complete spectrum of viewpoints.

>It must be acknowledged that most people do not want to hear from the complete spectrum of viewpoints.

I'd phrase it differently. I'd say most people online are incapable of hearing from the complete spectrum of viewpoints.

Because moving around the real world, talking to strangers for various reasons, you will end up hearing things you don't like. There is no way to de-federate from them. You just have to deal with that. And people online have a tendency to be very spoiled on this front, to want to custom tailor the human experience so there is nothing negative in it. This is a fake experience and not at all representative of humanity.

Let’s be honest here - the “different viewpoints” we’re talking about isn’t just differing taxation policies.

I do not want - in real life or on the internet - to hear from pro-pedophilias or the pro-ana crowd. Any space that welcomes and encourages those people is not a space that I want to be in.

We “defederate” in real life all the time. If a bar in town becomes known as “the nazi bar”, I won’t go there. If my favourite cafe adds a shooting range to the side, I’ll stop going there.

See there you go taking it to the extreme immediately. What makes you think I mean pedophiles and whatever ana is?

I've been in the fedi since 2017 and I've seen whole instances get de-federated for a lot less than that.

I might frame it slightly differently: while we have built a federated medium for sending and viewing messages, we have not yet figured out the right conventions for how to run it so it becomes a thriving community. Those conventions are things like governance structure and user expectations. Once those are in place, a durable community can form that adapts to those over time.

Every medium has conventions of use that ultimately determine what it becomes. A medium without conventions is an experimental toy, which is what mastodon has been for a long time (and to an extent what film was before groundbreaking works like Citizen Kane). Now that it is going more mainstream, the conventions need to find their way into broad use. Specifically the tooling on mastodon really needs work. It needs cross-instance community notes, it needs higher level content mod tools, it needs financial structures to support operation, etc.

Basically, there's way more to social networks and community than some tech that delivers messages, and thats where the rub is.

Yeah we have a long way to go to creating a true digital town square.

Because in a town square setting you have to hear opposing opinions sometimes, and you can't silence the people, you can't de-federate from them. You can simply move away and talk to someone else, form cliques. And that is exactly what is happening in the fediverse, drawing borders, borders of opinion and political context.

I don't think it's healthy to dismiss large swathes of humanity though. I think it's better if we communicate and find middle grounds.

Which is easier to do when you're stuck with someone IRL. Online it's much easier to reach for that block button.

Agree. Instances are well-suited to smaller communities of people, but the idea of a broader town square with people that are sufficiently different from us I think requires rethinking the medium a bit. What we have doesn't cut it, and we keep assuming clunky and sometimes counterproductive tools like blocking (or blocking instances) are going to fix it this time.

For a town square product we need to build from the assumption of it not being small community, which I think is unlike how twitterlike products are designed today. That requires encoding different conventions & assumptions of how we interact into the product, because we've brought a UI (the tweet/reply box) that assumes familiarity with the people we're talking to, when there likely is none.

Something I've been doing as a hobby is putting together different ideas for how to improve this medium, and especially around this problem. We're squeezing the expansiveness of human beliefs and behaviors through tiny little tweet-shaped holes, and a lot is getting lost.

> For example, Mozilla is currently experimenting with a Discover feed that aims to surface engaging content. Over time, it plans to gather more signals from around the fediverse to determine what sort of content people are interacting with.

Until this is integrated into Mastodon by default - or any other new social network - its success will be limited to a niche at best. The only reason Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest have been able to retain users is because of the algorithms which surface engaging content that keeps users coming back for more. (Sadly for society, the most "engaging" is usually the most polemic or inflammatory possible, which bad actors have abused successfully with tragic results for all of us.)

Let me back up this statement with simple math:

If you follow 100 accounts (not a crazy amount) and they post an average of 5 times a day (some more, some less), that's 500 posts a day to process. Assuming 16 waking hours a day, that's a tweet every 2 minutes. The more people you follow, the crazier the numbers get.

Over a decade ago when I still used Twitter and its API still functioned, I pulled my personal feed into a custom database, and then added my own web UI on top of it so I could try different ways of seeing all the posts from accounts I followed. I tried grouping by user, time, topic, custom ordering, filtering, formatting, etc. It turns out, it was impossible. No matter what I tried, the sheer quantity of posts means I'd miss a majority of them. At the time, I foolishly thought that this meant social media was just a fad that would soon go away - I didn't foresee the effect the discovery algorithms would have on their usage.

Mastodon doesn't have this functionality by default and because of the federated nature of the service, probably won't any time soon. So people join Mastodon, use it for a while before they reach a tipping point, get overwhelmed by toots, don't feel they're getting any decent response for their own posts, don't see anything instantly engaging at the top of their feed, and then slowly stop using it.

Everything in this post is specific to you. Some people like to go to a social media site and have an algorithm spoon-feed them garbage. I'm someone that doesn't. Mastodon is way, way better for someone like me. And judging from my Mastodon timeline, it's working well for a lot of others too.

Let me suggest something crazy. Maybe a social network can exist and thrive even if there's another social network with more users.

The differences between walled garden social media and the fediverse is significant. Not all users from the algorithmically driven varieties will find a new home in the fediverse, and I guess thats OK.

I have been a part of the Fediverse since 2017 and have built up a very different network of friends and interesting people and projects. The tempo is slower. I don't check the feed compulsively several times an hour as I often did with Twitter, but I do check in now and then and get occational notifications when low frequency / high quality posters put out something new.

It's different and it might not suit everyone, but I like it. It's more human and I'm more in control. And no ads, just people!

I never used the native Twitter app - my Twitter experience was solely through Tweetbot, and that was strictly a chronological timeline of posts from people I followed. Which is identical now to my mastodon experience with Ivory.

Hmm I would disagree. I used to love Facebook when I could follow my friends with it. Since they replaced the timeline with that ridiculous feed with content I never asked for, it became a real drag. I don't want to see anything I didn't specifically follow. The same way I don't want to receive spam emails.

People like me are not a majority but more common than you think. The problem is, if you do what we want you can't market anything to us. That's why the platforms do this.

Mozilla is not going to like the outcome of a decentralized social networking future, seeing as they're political ideologues in favor of censorship[1]. What they're trying to do is hop into a new fad to increase their reach. I honestly don't think most people care whether Mozilla operates a fediverse instance or not.

At any rate, the future of social networking is not the fediverse, it's Nostr. ActivityPub simply has too many architectural shortcomings to be more than a novelty, in particular, you cannot guarantee that your audience receives your messages to them unless they're restricted to a subset of the network's servers. The fact that your identity is owned by a server admin is a centralizing force on the network, and different groups isolating from one another is a fragmenting force. It may be the case that such an architecture becomes standard, but it is not ideal, and seeing as it is early days with these social networking alternatives and there's already an architecurally superior option leads me to the conclusion that the fediverse will be eclipsed relatively soon.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

We'll see, but I would argue that at least for most of the conversations worth having, fragmentation is good. It is of course annoying and not what anyone wants in the short term, but it's also the only thing that has been observed in practice to semi-reliably prevent a social space from going to shit. Broad reach implies the strength of any one social relationship going to zero, and you have to multiply that small value by a big number to get any value worth the effort. And we all know where that logic leads.

On the other hand, people will probably do everything they can to "fix" it or work around it and broaden their reach, so it's hard to say anything about any specific technology or frontend.

> Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken:

> - Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.

> - Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.

> - Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.

> - Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.

Except for the "tools to amplify factual voices", these all seem like pretty reasonable and inarguable improvements? How are these pro-censorship? If anything, calling for more transparency in promoted content is anti-censorship.

Or, are we just getting hung up over a shallow interpretation of the heading?

Yeah, these all seem like arguments in favour of transparency and openness, in fact, not censorship. The only other advocacy in this post that lands within a stones throw of "censorship" is condemning hate speech.

> Except for the "tools to amplify factual voices"

They felt the need to include it, if they didn't I would agree with what they are trying to do. Why do they need to launder that line item with the rest?

Many people prefer facts over the lies, propaganda, misrepresentations, exaggerations, cheats, scams, accusations, and other FUD promulgated by some of the media and many agencies, politicians and advertisers. They're not that hard to discern, for adults at least.

This move seems to fit right in with the rest of Mozilla's program.Seems like a good move ... and the majority of people on the Fediverse seem likely to agree.

Adults disagree on many things and are willing to kill each over those disagreements in some cases, even when it comes to what the "truth" is. So color me quite skeptical that any tool that anyone uses is going to be free from such biases unless it's solely in the domain of verifying mathematical correctness in some strictly defined ontological system.

You're so right.

The whole idea of universal 'Truth' is a big part of most of our problems, yes. As the pre-Platonic Protagoras tried to assert, we need to temper our judgements by recognizing that different perspectives lead to relatively different conclusions.

Facts that all can observe and agree on are the basis of tolerance of interpretations we can't agree on. For millenia, some have insisted that they have been gifted with some ultimate truths. Nonsense. So yes, agreed-on, observed facts are the basis what we need more of, with other sorts of assertions carrying much less weight.

This is going to be another Mozilla failure.

The era of big, public social media has peaked. People know better now: Big Brother is always watching, and what you post will be linked back to your real identity, maybe 10 years from now, whether you like it or not. What you post on Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, Instagram, even HN, is no longer your real, authentic self, it's an idealized self that you're marketing to someone. Decentralized/federated or centralized is irrelevant; if it's publicly accessible, it's all the same.

Social media has shifted to the world of smaller communities that can't be discovered (or at least are much harder to discover) by the outside world. The younger generation are using Roblox and Fortnite as places to hang out and meet new people. The slightly less young generation has moved to Discord. I'm in Discord servers of a variety of topics (games, music, TV, programming...) and it's a world of difference how people act when they're neither trying to ragebait to harvest likes and retweets nor stepping on eggshells to avoid ruining their job prospects because an employer Googled their name.

The internet is just too damn big now. We aren't in a world where there's space on the internet for people to give updates when the poop comes out anymore.[0] Making another social media site whose target audience is "the internet", both in terms of viewers and writers, is a fool's errand.

[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre

Aren’t discord and Roblox communities part of a decentralized social network???

Discord is completely centralized. What they call servers aren't.

AFAIK Roblox relies on a centralized server for the account system and you can't play without an account. You can't put up a Roblox server on your LAN to play with friends when the Internet is down. If Roblox servers are down, no one could play. Unlike Minecraft*, Terraria, Quake, IRC, etc. When you have a Place on Roblox it's like having a page on Geocities, where Geocities could still go down and take everyone's stuff with it.

*Minecraft might need a special client to dodge the authentication issue

Discord is also very much centralized, but a sibling comment already mentioned that.

They are decentralised in the same way that reddit is decentralized. As in, not at all.

You might have good points about this usage of the deep web, but doing it on a platform like Discord is still pretty much the opposite of "avoiding Big Brother".

“From a content discovery standpoint, I’m really interested in how we can seed conversations and seed experiences with really high-quality content — certainly, editorial publisher content”

I’ve been waiting so long for my mastodon conversations to be seeded with high quality editorial publisher content

It's always a good time to remember that the Firefox Sync data is encrypted with the Mozilla account password, so every further usage of the Mozilla account they introduce is another chance for someone (Mozilla or law enforcement) to gain the ability of decrypting that data.

But your Firefox Account password is never sent to the server.

(Although the code that does the auth does come live from the server which is a notable weakness)

The code that asks you the password comes from the server, and incredibly that's even for logging in to Firefox (and even many years after it's been introduced).

That means that the password and key can be obtained whenever a Mozilla server wants.

It's at this point impossible to believe it wasn't done like that on purpose (after pressure from someone); there's absolutely no reason to do and keep doing something like that other than to secure the ability to look at that data

The earlier version of their sync protocol, Weave, only had local encryption. If you forgot the encryption password you lost your sync data with no possibility of recovery. Pale Moon remains the only browser sticking to the older version of sync, although it doesn't have a mobile version anymore and syncing would only make sense between 2 or more PCs.

Even in decentralized networks, power concentrates to the very few. We need to figure out how to democratically own and operate our platforms (and the world, lol).

Just statistically speaking, based on past performance, would you be better off betting with or against Mozilla?

It pains me greatly, but I would bet against them eleven out of ten times.

I would bet on Mozilla doing anything that doesn't involve fixing bugs in Firefox.

Honestly, for this one?

I'd bet slightly more optimistically than normal, simply because it's not a service/product Mozilla themselves are launching. They're merely becoming part of the Fediverse, which isn't dependent on them or their management/strategy.

As a FF user since beta, definitely bet against them. Top brass is truly incompetent there.

Hey techcrunch, its not "consumers", its people. Lets stop this ugly, supposedly business savvy but just lazy and wrong, consumerization of humanity.

On the main point, the fediverse is the future irrespective what Mozilla does but it is great news to have such an entity help accelerate developments and exploring the phase space or possibilities.

Decentralized social networking is really just Web 3.0, the next phase of RSS and much more. Focusing on mastodon, the dysfunction of politics as reflected on Twitter/X etc is missing the point by a few parsecs. Wordpress now has an activitypub plugin. Any web platform that respects itself has one in the works. This is not exactly dot.com era giddiness but there is definetely a feel of a new window opening.

Nevertheless mastodon is the server type that got early traction, it makes sense to benefit from the insights this is providing. The sad truth is that because adtech so thoroughly destroyed social media, we dont even know how to build a sane alternative. Moderation tech is definitely an area deserving an open and human-centered stack.

Firefox deserves better.

Invest in the opposite of what Mozilla is investing at and you'll be a billionaire fast.

Digging their own grave.

Care to elaborate what you mean by this? There's a lot of valid criticism of Mozilla in 2023 but what this article is talking about doesn't seem like it on the surface.

Look at their website, it's just a twitter clone.

How will Mozilla compete with Meta, Twitter?

https://mozilla.social/public/local

Content is complete garbage.

Decentralisation isn't a feature for 99.9% of people.

It's just a mastodon instance, not something new - part of the fediverse.

This is what the article is saying there’s a waitlist for and it’s also going to be moderated. So how is it going to be different than Twitter?

I guess you didn't know about mastodon until now. I have joined there but social media isn't really for me, so I can't really speak for it: https://joinmastodon.org

I don't think it has a chance to ever be as popular as twitter, simply because they don't want to add features to make it addictive.

Decentralization is a feature for the type of people who use Firefox. Mozilla's pivoting towards being a haven for the types of people who don't like their data being sold or mined.

The majority or Mozilla’s revenue is from “search partnerships”.

Thanks for the link, I didn't even know that existed. The content is about exactly what I'd have expected for users of a Mozilla social network. Take that to mean what you will.

> How will Mozilla compete with Meta, Twitter?

This is the wrong framing. We should be asking how the Fediverse will compete with mainstream social media. Mozilla is just doing one part of a larger collective project. And so far Fedi has done so pretty well considering the relative amount of manpower behind development. And there's a lot of reasons for that.

We're already entombed under deep layers of enshittification caused by excessive centralization. So if they're digging a grave it's just to meet us where we're at.

Who cares what Mozilla is betting on? They've never been able to break even, never mind make a profit.

So you choose a product based on how much profit a company extracts from it, good for you

given that the Mozilla foundation is a non-profit organisation and all revenues from Mozilla the corporation flow back into Mozilla projects that last part shouldn't come as a shock. And of course they're break even, they are not dept funded.

(e-begging and) getting funded by a dominant player that wants to maintain the illusion of meaningful competition in the market is not "breaking even", it's being a useful idiot. when has mozilla made anything that actual customers actually wanted to pay money for in large & sustained numbers?

never but neither has anyone else. That isn't how consumer facing internet products work. You know many browsers people pay for? Any consumers who pay for Google or Facebook? The digital economy is large companies paying each other for eyeballs while consumers want free stuff. Mozilla is no different in that regard, this is what people want. You're barking up the wrong tree if you think Mozilla is responsible for this.

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