Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future

Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 608 points – Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future | TechCrunch
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The mission-driven tech company behind the Firefox browser, Pocket reader and other apps is now investing its energy into the so-called “fediverse” — a collection of decentralized social networking applications, like Mastodon, that communicate with one another over the ActivityPub protocol.

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Hey, that's us!

I thought they were just adding activitypub to some products / making their own accounts but

However, the company is aiming to tackle some of the obstacles that have prevented users from joining and participating in the fediverse so far, including the technical hurdles around onboarding, finding people to follow and discovering interesting content to discuss.

What Mozilla wants to accomplish, then, is to help reconfigure the Mastodon onboarding process so that when someone — including a publisher or creator — joins its instance (or the fediverse in general) they’re able to build their audience with more ease.

Now THAT would be cool. If the browser had a built in way to handle some of this stuff, it would be a lot simpler to deal with some of the issues. I'd love to learn more

This is literally the bottleneck of all of fediverse imo.

With ease of use integrated into the fediverse, half of social media could become irrelevant.

My brain went "Firefox has what 7% market share? What's 50% of that?? Actually, that probably is 4x the 'Fediverse' user total right there"

4.87% on North American Desktops, 6.16% worldwide, 10.77% in Europe, 17.43% in Germany. Not even showing up on mobile and tablet, here's the numbers.

World-wide usage of adblock is much higher, 42.7%, so if Google actually goes through with their plan Chrome is going to lose market share, massively.

I feel like if Firefox added features for the fediverse, they'd do it in a way that other browsers could implement it too.

With Facebook and Tumblr working on Fediverse stuff, it would be weird if Chrome didn't add the features too

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It does make sense. Most of the android users directly use google search bar and dont even bother to open a browser directly if its one shot query or not using multiple tabs.

7 was a stand in for a single digit numbet.. didn't realize it was that low. Yikes

Three percent of all browsers is a fuckton of users, considering that includes mobile users who are going to be less likely to change their browser then desktop users. There is an estimated 6.92 billion smartphone users. Three percent of that is more users than there are people in the United States.

I remember the good old days when FF almost hit 30%.

It makes a lot of sense to me to just have minimum standards for Fediverse instances, and then anyone who wants to host users can be a default instance for a period of time and just rotate through them Round Robin-style so nobody gets slammed with too many new users at once.

Edge allows you to "follow" YouTube channels outside of the website itself, not sure how deep that integration goes though as I've never bothered to use it.

Also this is the idea behind Grayjay, where creators would be able to have a "universal identity" across platforms.
For now it's mostly a YouTube and some other video streaming sites alternative.

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