Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

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Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.

Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.

Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.

Rust/Servo/Quantum culminated in tangible benefits that reflect successfully played out projects from which Firefox reaped major rewards. And FireFox OS, perhaps more than any other, is something I wish we had right now, because if they never gave up on it and we had a 10+ year old alternative mobile OS waiting for its moment, it could have been well positioned in a moment like this one where Android is increasingly betraying the trust of its developers. I think the Yahoo/Mozilla partnership, quickly forgotten, could have been meaningful if there was good vision.

Yahoo had a major collection of properties that still had relevance, and core services like email, search and maps that I remember Matt Yglesias (of all people) insisting would have been the keys to the success of a FirefoxOS. Yahoo had the infrastructure, but no vision and a bad brand, and Mozilla was the inverse. An interesting what-if that unfortunately amounted to nothing.

"but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important"

Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them to know?

The average user is a moron. This is key to all tech and key to why complex shit like Mastodon will never see wide adoption.

Yep. Everyone understands email, not everyone understands that email is federated, and yet everyone benefits from federation.

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