MozillaSocial | Hacker News Reader

MozillaSocial

github.com

82 pointsulrischa85 comments

Interesting, they also have a live web version at: https://mozilla.social/ albeit not available (for login) at my location just yet. I can see the whole website with live feeds though thankfully.

Mastadon feeds are already available in "federated" section which is quite nice.

Mostly UI seems to be a twitter clone, which is great as a starting point for inviting new users.

It has a dark mode and a separate mode to hide chrome and fluff called "zen mode". Yay!

I really hope Mastodon is just a stepping stone and evolutionary dead end.

The "federation mods are all powerful" is another step in the wrong direction. Reddit mods revel in the control they wield, and we've already seen this happening in the Mastodon ecosystem all over again.

BlueSky's protocol will allow end users to subscribe to the moderator(s) they want without having to worry about choices being made for them carte blanche by online dictators lording over their fiefdoms.

The internet bred the worst kind of power structures. We're sliding backwards with these platforms that enable and empower useless middle managers.

Right on. Not only that, but from what I've read, the protocol is a mess. It lurches in a number of directions but doesn't successfully reach any of them. So it's really hard to develop for, you pretty much have to be an insider to make any progress. Which adds up to a terrible standard.

But above all, as you pointed out, why are people trying so hard to replicate an obviously easily exploitable and now more prone to individual failure/abuse model? Is unprotected identities and scraps of paper, oh and tags like 2007 twitter, really the best, most user honouring application of current tech?

https://cosocial.ca/@hrefna@hachyderm.io/111692934209903603

I'm curious what you're reading into what Hrefna said to make you believe that the protocol is a mess. If there is such a thing, it's mostly due to many fediverse developers trying to maintain interop with Mastodon, which leads to innumerable quirks that one needs to be mindful of.

Why do you think another protocol which has barely any implementations at the moment would be better when confronted with the same problem: many developers, interpreting some things in many ways?

hmm did you read the entire thread? comments like «The problem is that _AP itself_ is hard to implement correctly and nontrivially in a way that scales», «I was surprised at how difficult I found the spec(s) to read compared to theoretically more complex ones I've read in the past,» «something went direly wrong in the standards realm sometime around the OAuth2 RFC, which says verbatim that following the spec as it stands will produce implementations that don't interoperate. ActivityPub has the same nature and when we complained about it last year we got a bunch of dweebs telling us that the activitypub spec is fine because it has optional protocol annexes that "all the real implementations" follow»…

and basically all the comments. including yours.

I wasn't specifically endorsing Bluesky, but it would not be surprising if a professional, clean slate protocol based on the "learnings" of the past would be simpler to implement and just all round better. I think the use of DIDs opens up to many interesting options, none of which need to use a blockchain.

It's a shame about ActivityPub, I think Linked Data is a really important tech that hasn't been picked up enough, but from what I hear it's a really half hearted implementation at best.

I have developed ActivityPub software, I am aware exactly how difficult it is to implement - which is less than what Hrefna's thread would lead one believe.

I think the main thesis of what she is saying is that there are a many places where developers need to think for themselves because the spec has many blind spots. But that's why we also develop tools and libraries to make it easier for future devs to start from a good foundation. She is doing it (as far as I know), and I am doing it.

> Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.

> I have developed ActivityPub software, I am aware exactly how difficult it is to implement - which is less than what Hrefna's thread would lead one believe.

I have developed too but it wasn't very difficult for me. Well, in most cases all my problems were due to my laziness to read ActivityPub rfcs carefully.

It should not be "deep magic." That is the problem. It should be pretty ordinary for anyone to use it. I hope you and others are making libraries to improve the situation.

That last part was a joke to underscore the fact that I'm not speaking in ignorance. :P

I feel like you're showing way too much trust into what AT Proto will be able to do in some nebulous future when the reality is that there are barely any servers running outside of Bluesky (if any). Until AT Proto is proven as a federated protocol the same way ActivityPub is I would take comparisons - even for mostly unrelated capabilities, which moderation is - with a pinch of salt.

So far Mastodon has been reasonable, but I've personally seen another federated Reddit clone Lemmy fell down this Rabbit hole. The two "biggest" instances admins are all power hungry and like to bully users to exert their authority.

The people who always end up as admins and power moderators on these sites are absolutely the ones who should not have it.

I know this is probably not what you want to hear, but you just need to search for the right instance.

You must treat the fediverse the same way as your neighbourhood not a club. You should not go to the most glamourous instance, but find one that has people that share the same values you do.

All instances combined of Lemmy is already small. If 99% of the traffic of the all instances combined come from 2-3 instances and all of it is run by terrible people then I don't really see how going somewhere that has a handful of active people is a solution. Honestly that particular federated experiment has failed which is fine. More will pop up.

> Honestly that particular federated experiment has failed which is fine.

Everybody is complaining about failures in the fediverse but nobody applies the elbow grease to grow better communities. It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy there. :)

I was busy doing just that and grew a community to 10,000 subscribers. Things were going great and then the administrators abused their powers and took over the community and banned me. They don't follow their own rules so I don't see the point. I was in it for the long haul, but such a thing really destroys your motivation.

It's a neat trick though. Let other people put in the work and then ban them and give their communities to their friends.

Ideally you do this in a community where you trust the sysop, or you are the sysop. See my previous comment.

What I'll say to that advice is that it boils down to self-bubbling, which isn't what some want, and not what most need.

Wow that's a great idea by BlueSky. I hadn't heard of or thought of that approach!

Can you link to a page about that Bluesky's moderator part? Thanks!

Composable Moderation:

https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

Anyone can label content. It can be human or automated. Different teams can expose their own sets of labels.

The end user chooses which labels they want hidden or displayed.

- - - - - -

Edit:

The downvotes I'm getting triggered the HN commenting rate limit, and I can no longer post comments. (Another form of censorship. Though I do appreciate everything HN does to be "high signal", there are some rough edges. I really want for systems that just get out of the way and let people communicate.)

Here's my response to a child comment:

> Which is entirely possible to do under ActivityPub.

Several Mastodon instances block people who federate or engage elsewhere. That's the kind of fucked up middle management that a first-principles distributed moderation system would solve.

For instance, I'm LGBT and I'd like to engage with the community. But I don't want the mods running the instance choosing what I can or cannot see because they don't like eg. Harry Potter. That's my individual decision to make.

Frankly, I have a thick skin and I like to be exposed to lots of different people and ideas. And I even enjoy talking with those that disagree with me. I respect people who have the opposite opinion about this, but I don't want to be caught up in their censorship blast radius.

Nobody should get to choose who talks to me except for me.

- - - - - -

Edit 2:

Look at how stupid this gets on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/al3r4q/co...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/10kgo0y/a_subre...

https://www.reddit.com/r/infp/comments/18ynfaq/comment/kgc8x...

Platformization of the distributed web of the 90's and 00's was bad enough. Now we're empowering people to silence broad group participation over pettiness.

I hate this. And I don't hate very many things.

- - - - - -

Edit 3:

> find one that has people that share the same values you do.

That's a mismatch. In any group of people, there will never be 100% consensus. Yogurt lovers won't all like FroYo, and some will die on the hill of Kefir.

The correct thing to do is compose your interests and group memberships yourself. It's flexible. You'll overlap with other people, topics, and ideas naturally. Not every individual of every community you join will see eye to eye with the sum of the people in your circle. And that's okay.

Another analogy: perhaps your extended family don't all get along. But you don't typically ostracize an entire branch of the family because you can't put them all in the same room together.

The Reddit/Mastodon way is about labeling the individual. You have to be a card-carrying member. If you do things the management doesn't like, you're out.

The distributed approach is about an individual navigating their preferences themselves. It's fuzzy, organic, and matches the real world. It's not a dictatorship of ideology or ass-kissing.

> But I don't want the mods running the instance choosing what I can or cannot see because they don't like eg. Harry Potter. That's my individual decision to make.

Yes, such a phenomenon takes place there sometimes, mostly this problem occurs on some little servers with few active users. I don't think it's a big problem for fediverse, there are servers with adequate moderation you can choose or just run your own.

I guess the only way out is to go fully decentral with something like GoToSocial

Which is entirely possible to do under ActivityPub. It's baffling to me to think that people can't grasp that servers can, and most likely will, implement server level filtering on incoming content. I doubt there's anything that the AT protocol can do to prevent other implementors doing their own thing.

They're using a fork of Elk, an amazing mastodon client, which works really well as a PWA btw

My daily mastodon client. No need for an app on my phone, same interface on big or small screens. Almost perfect.

The spelling is "Mastodon", like the extinct megafauna. The client also displays other ActivityPub feeds.

It's still a horrible name. Doesn't roll off the tongue, unfamiliar to a broad audience, connotations of extinction. And don't even get me started on "toot".

I won't, since instances like mastodon.social have been using "post" for over a year now.

Personally I think "toot" is perfectly fine; no sillier than "tweet".

Tweet is a noise birds make when they're talking to each other

Toot is a fart

Horns toot. One can toot their own horn even.

Yes but as arses tooting is funnier that interpretation will always take precedence

At least it's not as bad as Bluesky's skeet, I'll give it that

E: returning from a rabbit hole. Looks like Mastodon retired toot back in 2022 anyway (and skeet was never officially sanctioned by Bluesky)

The toot is moot.

Don't forget X's xeets!

It's ambiguous and overloaded. Even if you explain to users (a situation you should never find yourself in), they'll still subconsciously maintain the overloaded meaning.

Yes how will people ever wrap their heads around it? Those poor stupid users…

Not to mention people abbreviate it as "masto", which just sounds stupid.

I think your downvoters haven't noticed your username. Thanks for the chuckle.

I'm glad someone got it.

If you want to follow me on Mastodon, BTW, you can find me at @masto@masto.masto.com.

Does 'federated' section get decided for everyone on that server, or can people on that server choose which other servers to get items from?

As a user, you can mute entire servers if you want to. The admins can also block servers for all users. The list of blocked servers does not seem to be visible from https://mozilla.social/about

Mozilla is very invested in the success of Threads-to-Mastodon so I'm sure they'll allow federation.

If only Mozilla would create an RSS reader, or bring it back to Firefox. That would be a game changer. People are growing sick of social media and RSS is surging again. What we need is an advert free cross platform Foss client of the quality that Mozilla are uniquely situated to deliver.

Personally, I wouldn't use that unless it synced between my desktop and mobile. At that point it might as well be a webapp...

Currently using FreshRSS and happy with it. Granted, the fact that it installs on a server means it's not for general use though.

Firefox Sync would work perfectly for most users, without the need to spin up a server or host data on the cloud.

That could keep track of feeds you're subbed to, but the problem is keeping track of which posts you've already read. Once you're having to sync all of that, it might as well be a web app.

Why? Firefox Sync already syncs my browsing history, bookmarks, and tabs frequently enough that it appears to be real time from my perspective. What is different about an RSS feed's "read" log?

In my experience, the history and tabs sync when they feel like it. All my stuff ends up there eventually, but I can't expect that I'll sit down, close Firefox on mobile, and have the tabs and history show up on desktop.

I always read about people going on about synching Desktop and Mobile as this killer feature, and it always puzzled me.

I tried using it for a while to check if it would fundamentally make me feel different, but after a couple of years I saw zero benefit.

What are people using that they really need this for?

This is news stories though. You don't want to read the stories on one machine and have it show up again on another machine.

I suppose it depends on how you consume your feeds: do you look at the latest, like a social media timeline? or read every entry of some blogs, like an inbox? I definitely have some feeds I consume like the latter, and I need that to persist and sync.

Maybe that's the thing - the things I read on my cell phone and the things I read on my computer are fundamentally different. I am surprised that I seem to be in the minority on this, maybe.

Likewise, any information or news delivery product being developed today that doesn't take both mobile and desktop into consideration during planning stages is a product you shouldn't use.

Firefox already does some syncing. If they added rss, it's likely that they'd add it to the syncing (as optional).

> If only Mozilla would...

I've read many negative comments about Mozilla every time it's in the news. Although we can acknowledge that there have been some governance missteps, Mozilla has been a consistently positive presence in the modern Web.

> ...create an RSS reader, or bring it back to Firefox.

Here are instructions for using the Feedbro extension:

https://github.com/bigideas-ca/firefox-rss-howto

> Mozilla has been a consistently positive presence in the modern Web.

I don't disagree. What I'm saying is that it would be amazing if they could create a Firefox of RSS or at least bake RSS back into Firefox. Cross platform syncing, no ads and telemetary, free as in beer and freedom, excellent UI, feeds synced across devices, integrated with Firefox somehow, perhaps even some well thought through social features, etc.

Social media displaced rss, but now that so many recognise that social media tends to be toxic, addictive, exploitative, you name the evil, it's a good time reverse this move. RSS is the best way to follow the internet without losing your head.

> RSS is the best way to follow the internet without losing your head.

Egad, Friend! It seems that we are in full agreement. On the Internet, no less. ^_^

I used the Feedbro extension and find it good enough to recommend. When I am in a terminal, I also use a custom script.

I’ve got a sense that this is only true in the tech echo chamber. Is RSS really surging in a general way? Zero of the people I’m with right now even know what RSS is.

and that's good. RSS is a distribution method, it should not matter to the final user.

Yes that’s a good point. So long as it’s sufficiently abstracted. Though I’m not sure people in general are getting tired of social media.

Exactly, nobody needs to know that it's used for podcasts too.

Really like NewsBlur - https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

If only they can add RSS support and newsletter subscriptions backed by Firefox Relay in Pocket, it can actually become a whole lot more useful.

If you need something like this today, try Omnivore[1]. Their RSS support is a bit wonky but very promising.

[1]: https://omnivore.app

Is that not what Thunderbird is (amongst other things)?

Mozilla dropped Thunderbird years ago, it runs independently now.

Hmm can you elaborate on that?

> Thunderbird is now part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation

Are you saying that it technically lives under the Mozilla umbrella but they take a completely hands-off approach?

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

DuckDuckGo is a nice alternative to Google if you want to research "unusual" things that you don't want to mussy up your search history.

Meh, ffx is fundamentally an email client. I think it's not a great fit for an RSS reader. Eg in RSS you may want to browse posts with images and snippets, laid out in cards. Eg more like a social media site. Thunderbird lays everything as a list of emails. I'm sure this works for some but I think it's far too narrow in scope.

I honestly can't think of any reason for the one-size-fits-all RSS reader to be in the core functionality of a browser. Extensions seem to be better suited for this purpose, and indeed there are several RSS extensions available for Firefox.

Agreed. I like Mozilla but this social app looks like Twitter but with less content. Tumblr or Instagram are better options.

This is a Mastodon instance.

No wonder why it’s so sad

I don't really use social media (no Facebook, twitter etc.) and have not kept up well with the various new technologies and terms in the field (e.g. mastodon etc.). But I use Firefox and like Mozilla so I am interested in what this is. But to the untrained eye, what is it? It looks a bit like Twitter.

I think the information shown via the small "About" link (bottom right) should be more prominent on the main page. At least some of it - to explain what this site is.

mozilla.social is a deployment of a Mastodon server. Anyone with a mozilla.social account can communicate with the wider "fediverse".

For the frontend, they are using a customized version of a web client called elk.zone, which is open source and indeed made to look at lot like Twitter.

It looks like Mastodon.