Mozilla exits the Fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Edit : people answering my message probably think as I did that Mastodon enables messages migration (your posts), but no. The "fediverse" doesn't allow you to migrate your posts with your profile migration. It's like keeping your android contacts but losing all your photos. Well more precisely, they're on this old hard drive, you can't show them to your friends and the hard drive can disappear anytime.
2019 issue with 500 likes, core team doesn't care much. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
Nostr is closer to a real decentralized social network, though it has other problems. Chief among these is trying to be Twitter, which has always been a model of interaction that lends itself to obnoxiousness. This was also a problem with Mastodon. If we're trying to do better, we should not be trying to duplicate a toxic environment. Still Nostr is architecturally superior.
I think (hope, TBH) that Nostr can fill the niche of the Usenet of the past where some groups did slide into obnoxiousness but others maintained intelligent and thoughtful discussions for many years. My 2c.
Users will vote with their feet.
What was required to start a new usenet domain? (a bit before my time)
Assuming you mean a new newsgroup (discussion forum for a single topic e.g. comp.lang.lisp):
- If you wanted it in the Big 8 hierarchy, you had to campaign for it and get support and prove it would have traffic.
- If you wanted it in alt.*, you just posted a control message (and then everyone ignored your group)
Or you could make your own hierarchy but it's up to each individual server which hierarchies they carry.
There is also Nostr chess, Nostr podcasting, Nostr marketplaces, Nostr data vending machines, Nostr blogs, and more. See https://nostrapps.com/ for a sample of what people are making.
I can totally see instance admins denying a transfer after banning you (because if they banned you they probably would like to punish you further).
Also, no GIF support. I asked the admin if he was wanting to get my help, or some funds to help for the servers. Said no.
Imagine : to get GIF support by switching instance, I would lose my posts.
After I did the migration, we talked, the backup worked again.
Couldn't even see his answers nor thank him, since once the migration is acted you lose access to your past discussions.
Disclosure : my account was censored, I did not respect one of the "laws" specific to the instance.
In the early 2000s, hackers were staunch defenders of free speech. The internet was a safe space from an often conservative and religiously Puritanical "meat space".
Now that the pendulum has swung, a majority seemingly wants to shut down the things and the people that they disagree with. Moreover, the accepted social behavior encourages this kind of hate and range and spite. It's even been gamified.
In many ways, the future turned out a lot worse than I'd hoped for. This is certainly one of the things I loathe.
People romanticize that time way more than it deserves.
I’m not a fan of censorship, but there’s a case to be made for reasonable adults deciding the ground rules. Case in point: Twitter.
Eehhh speak for yourself. I wish the young generation could experience the free and open and wild Internet that I did in the 90s and 00s...
Now they're stuck with ~10 websites run by giant megacorporations and "adults deciding the ground rules"...
Give the kids some credit, they're smarter than you think..
Those were exhilarating and heady times for many teenagers and children, to be sure, but you don't have any children of your own, do you?
But here's the deal: while I can and do moderate what passes through my server, there's absolutely nothing I can do about how you run yours. I'm not telling anyone they can't say certain things. I'm telling them they need to say it somewhere else.
By analogy, it's probably closer to a message board. If I were running a board for physicists, I feel absolutely zero obligation to allow crackpots to post anti-science nonsense and yell at the scientists there. They can go make their own message board, or Mastodon instance, if they want to say those things.
There is always going to be some percentage of interest overlap between users that gets destroyed by federated moderation. It's too coarse grained and ruins the decentralized possibilities of the internet.
That isn't to say that users shouldn't be able to filter out whatever they dislike. Rather, it would be best if that was a user's choice [1].
I participate in LGBT spaces, but I'm not going to block people for playing Harry Potter. I don't appreciate people stepping in my way to censor things they think I shouldn't see or hear.
To make an analogy with Reddit, if I make a comment in r/conservative (without necessarily even subscribing to their ideology), I get banned from dozens of other subreddits via automated moderation tools. That's a lot like how Mastodon thinks the world should work. But that's not how people are or should be.
Mastodon (and subreddit mods) think everyone should wear a membership pin or be emblazoned with a Scarlet Letter. That's incredibly harmful to people and is leading to increasing polarization in society.
[1] I'm sure that could even be done at scale by subscribing to community block lists. It shouldn't be a hassle, it just shouldn't be centrally planned and executed with no recourse from the end users.
This is the fucked up problem with federation and it's why we need true peer-to-peer social media.
Instead of corporate ideological kowtowing, now it's a thousand little fiefdoms of tiny tyrants deciding if you pattern fit to the ascribed dogma.
Your profile includes your posts and all your data, and you are free to move it around, back it up, host it wherever you want, etc... But all the posts are federated together.
I haven't looked at it closely in a while but I know they're still growing slowly but steadily..
Of course keeping your followers is important. But having a new empty wall was a real problem for me.
I didn't know it. Nobody told me, from the people to the interface that I would lose my 3500 messages. It's like having your blog content on another domain in the hands of another host, that can shut your old page down when he wants.
It's the perfect walled garden in terms of content.
Also, the instance where I was had its backup feature down for months. Finally, the followers migration failed at 80 %.
> On this page you can also download a copy of your archive that can be read by any ActivityPub software. This archive includes all of your posts and media. So even if the instance that you are moving from shuts down, as is the case with KNZK, you will still have a copy of all of your posts!
Sure, being able to get an archive is nice.
If the lack of import is caused by policy conflict or cost for administrators to review bulk-imported content, does this encourage individuals to have a paid instance to aggregate historical content, e.g. https://masto.host.
A couple of solutions: (a) post them on a website and put a link in your new Mastodon profile, or (b) use something like mastodon.py https://mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html to post them to your new account.
Does the old server redirect to your new account if someone linked to your old post(s) from somewhere else?
I believe for retaining content it's pretty much retaining it for yourself by downloading an archive, though some instances may allow uploading that. There's also at least one browser-based web app that lets you open and view the content of that archive - otherwise it's kind of useless.
Yes of course I'm getting the technical and conceptual difficulties as a developer, but it's awful UX. It's a real deal breaker once you discover it. You cannot use Mastodon as your primary content database anymore.
But I do agree UX could and should be better
It’s best to assume anything you don’t host yourself is ephemeral.
The people responding to you saying this is expected are missing the point.
Well not completely. Lots of people see microblogging as the daily rant, the cat pictures. For them, it's not a big problem.
But for people like me that use microbloging as a way to publish content, that use the search feature quite often to retrieve past thoughts, past links, etc it's a fatal flaw, like other users told it.
On top of that... instance mods powertripping is another issue. I don't care on which side of that godforsaken war in Israel/Palestine two different instance moderators are. But I do care when one of these morons drags in their user base into this bitch fight and decides to defederate from the instance ran by the other dude and suddenly I can't interact with a follower any more, I don't even get a warning "hey, you can't see posts from XYZ any more because their instance defederated from ours".
While I'd love to see Mastodon succeed at least in survival, it suffers from a bunch of very fundamental design and concept issues.
It is, frankly, a very unwelcoming place.
Clearly there's a market for both. And maybe they could even be... confederated? That is, it might be possible to combine several sources in your stream, and accept identities across servers for easy commenting. Heh, this all awfully reminds me of the stuff that was already built in early 2000s, with RSS/Atom, the original OpenID, and no huge corporations interested in taking over these small potatoes.
The other one is choosing a server. That's actually a critical first step that most don't really understand about the "fediverse". Just looking over the "rules" of mozilla.social is insufferable and a non-starter.
Personally I would start here, not because it is good but because it is simple.
These things have first-mover disadvantage, and last-mover advantage.
You miss being in the explore tab but I don't think that's the main source of traffic, and various bots or groups that re-share toots will likely spread your account far and wide.
Why would I spend time hosting an instance of mastodon ? I'm happy to pay for it.
Bluesky says it's 10 cents per user per year. Happy to pay for this.
Back in May I wrote a series of blog posts about mozilla.social, ActivityPub and what I thought could be done instead. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40428098)
I don't understand.. was this "Moz Social"? What is "Moz Social"? Google believes its the forums of some SEO bullshit company. Did the "Open Social Web" have 300 users?
God knows they did that guy dirty, but the executives at Mozilla really are a hopeless bunch.
> Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users as of the time of Tuesday’s announcement.
There is just no financial benefit for Mozilla in spinning up a Mastodon instance only to be used by what <300 active users?
> By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users.
That's Threads remember? They are now part of the 'fediverse' and interoperate with Mastodon with over ~180M+ monthly active users which is >150x bigger than the monthly active users of the entire fediverse!
We already have the results after witnessing a live experiment [0] when Brazil banned Twitter / X and with lots of alternatives to sign up to; the majority of Brazilians signed up to either Bluesky or Threads.
Maybe Mozilla looked at an actual migration from X to BlueSky or Threads and realized that there was really no point in running a Mastodon instance when Threads was the biggest one.
But anyway, I do agree that having their own instance is kind of pointless. We need to get rid of "servers" and get back to an Open Social Web. I wrote in May what I thought would be a smarter approach for them (https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi...). Instead of yet-another mastodon server, they would be better off if they started building something like https://browser.pub inside of Firefox.
Was the instance every actually open to the public? Seems to have been invite-only for the entire duration.
I'd also note that social media use differs hugely per country. See, for example, WhatsApp vs iMessage use in the US and outside, or how Brazil used to be big on Orkut. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from Brazilian usage patterns vs the rest of the world.
You can probably give an example that you actively use it, but you are probably one in a million.
Lets hope Meta is not going to steamroll over the fediverse in a similar way.
XMPP is a needlessly complex protocol with very poor organization and planning that, in the process of trying to cater to everyone, catered to nobody except a vocal aspirational group online.
Simply put, XMPP killed XMPP.
My point is that even if Facebook were to attempt EEE with ActivityPub, the existing userbase would not give up.
270 users on an instance is 100% fine. There are tons of instances with ~1 person. It's a federated system, it's like them running their own email domain: it costs little and they can interact with everyone, and it provides a measure of provable identity beyond just "@mozilla on totally.real.mastodon.xyz".
It does come with maintenance and moderation needs though, e.g. picking which users and instances you want(/need) to block. And some... quirks... that mean joining a mega-instance actually does behave better than a small instance. Kinda like email.
So far I haven't seen any reasons given why they're shutting it down. Just "it's shutting down". "Only 270 users" is almost certainly not related to it though, closed-registration official hosts is completely normal. Kinda like email.
Edit to add: although I guess this would be related to Firefox. Oh well!
The sad thing is that dev tools used to be Firefox's standout feature, but it seems that Google got that memo and Mozilla forgot it.
Citation please.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...
[X] Plus 58 Million Dollars for "Branding and marketing" and 108 Million Dollars for "General and administrative" ... ouch !
$200 millions are the aggregated expenses of ALL software 'development' efforts of Mozilla Corporation like VPN, Relay, Pocket, mozilla.social, etc. And there are a lot of interesting expenses which are billed as development. According to Lunduke (1) who dived into the details a bit, there are many very questionnable expenses which are not related to Firefox development.
So the questions is still very open, how much does Firefox development actually costs? Developing Thunderbird costed around $2 millions in 2021 (2).
1 - https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest... 2 - https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
(an exaggeration, but it wouldn't surprise me if a big portion of that is c suite salaries)
Only a fraction of Mozilla luxurious spending goes for Firefox development.
Then let's assume that a Firefox user would be willing to pay, on average, $5 / mo, or $60 / year, to support the project. More in richer countries, less in less well-off. This would mean that about 3.4 million of paying users would suffice.
Worldwide, Firefox has 362 million users [1]. Only 1% of users would have to pay an equivalent of a hamburger a month to sustain Firefox. If 5% paid, it would be a price of a cup of plain coffee per month.
Now we need just one teeny tiny thing: somebody capable of organizing this.
[1]: https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/firefox-statistics...
That and an efficient way of making those payments. Can we please get an online payment method that's as simple as cash already?
Anyway, $5/month isn't a micropayment and could easily be done through existing app stores.
Secure, anonymous cash payments would make so many things much easier. Want to read this paywalled article? Please pay €0.05. Download this application? That'll be €5.
Of course the anti-terrorism crowd would never let that happen.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
Also the question is still open, how many of those people are relevant for Firefox development. There are a lot of people working on other projects of Mozilla Co.
Mozilla tries very hard to not to answer those questions. They could have made a separate fund for Firefox development just like they did for Thunderbird. For comparison, Thunderfird team was 24 people in 2022 and development costed $2 million.
Better save your efforts into making sense of Mozilla's shady politics and economics and invest effort into promoting https://ladybird.org/ - a truly independent browser developed from scratch by a non-profit.
Also, donating to a non-profit is tax-deductible in the US, so some donations can be larger as a tax optimization.
Numbers of voluntarily paying users in open-source projects are usually pretty low, so 1% looks like the right ballpark, and is worth further research, as opposed to rejecting the approach outright as unrealistic.
I'm speaking about the existing user base, who do not need converting. Also, you speak of browsers as of indistinguishable commodity goods; they are not. The pressure that Google exerts to slowly strangle ad-blocking extensions in Chrome will likely make more people consider alternatives.
~$200M Developing Firefox
~$15M Executive salaries
~$1M Woke stuff
Lunduke is digging in the wrong place.
Snark aside, it's crazy how it's basically become impossible to build and maintain a browser unless you're a megacorp or a billionaire.
Turns out Network Effects are a pain pain in the ass if you don’t have them, but also none of those ever had a chance to kill twitter.
The objective is desc network but also want a single place for all our stuff, topics, news, etc
Same reason why Reddit haven’t been replaced yet :/
wrt to Reddit, I mean, Lemmy does exist, but much like Mastodon instances try to be "another Twitter", Lemmy (instances) also tries to be "another Reddit". At the end of the day, it's a human/userbase problem of "platforms change, hivemind doesn't".
It's a shocking amount of telemetry, combined with dark patterns to reset settings on every update.
Then you go to their website and see that "safe and private" is part of the headline sales pitch. Absolutely disgraceful.