Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon
techcrunch.com
"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw.... existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement... "
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We desperately need a company like Mozilla to take the reigns of something like Lemmy. The original developers are far too biased and short sighted to see the bigger picture, it needs to be an independent group that promotes more open source development.
Where do you get that from? I have no love for tankies, but from what I've seen, they've built a product that's free of their biases, opensourced it and thrown it over the wall with no strings attached.
If you want to make a rooten-tooten white supremacist nazi instance with Lemmy, you can do exactly that. Nobody has to federate with you, and you don't have to federate with them.
Strange take.
While I generally agree with you, you can't call that a strange take.
Their views are concerning, but so far I haven't seen them trying to force their views anywhere yet. And having a fork as a real option helps mitigate a lot of that risk.
I'm certainly okay with the $50k/year they're trying to make for working on this full time. I'd be fine with triple that.
If it gets out of hand, we have options. They're aware of that (in fact offered it), and have been acting appropriately afaik.
The bottom line is, they started something that's bigger than them, and created more than enough tools to fork from them if they become a problem.
I always like to point to Emby/Jellyfin as a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. They created something excellent, the community joined in, and it got popular. Then the maintainers decided to try and cash in, and the community immediately responded by forking into what would become Jellyfin. And nowadays, the discussion is between Plex vs Jellyfin, you rarely ever hear people talk about Emby anymore.
After a certain point of user adoption, FOSS (and copy-left) software should be able to stand on it's own without the creator's direct involvement. The community can take the wheel if necessary. The Lemmy devs have provided enough tools to do exactly that, and I believe there are more than enough experienced devs in this community that we would not struggle to find the necessary talent.
That's doesn't mean there isn't still a risk, though. This is social media, the technology is only half the story. The other half is getting people to move. I don't think I need to explain to anyone here how hard it is to get an entrenched user base to abandon a platform whose mainteners have gone off the rails.
Funny enough the post right below this one in my subscribed feed was a post from db0 asking about setting up media servers. And both of the top two comments recommend jellyfin, nobody recommended emby
Also: OPNsense. That wasn't even a case of going closed, it was Netgate making weird decisions regarding hardware encryption support. Of course, since then, Netgate has fallen completely off the wagon and done some incredibly stupid and harmful things.
Not for folks who have been following the development. It’s one thing if it’s just a couple of devs working on the project and trying their best, it’s an entirely different thing when a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues. It's become a pattern and will almost certainly continue. At this point a significant number of users have been lost because the devs have been largely unable to capitalize on previous waves on growth due to slow development. Because of all this Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.
This is the first I've heard of "a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues" and "Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute".
Can you give a summary or examples? I'm not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don't follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn't aware of any of this.
I dont know much about the primary developers of Lemmy, but from what I can tell this is a part time labor of love project for them. Its unreasonable to ask people to push beyond their boundaries or capacity so that their pet project can become a 1:1 replacement for an incredibly mature platform like Reddit overnight
To the detriment of the community, the admins, and the concept of the fediverse overall.
Unfortunately opinions do not always match.
If a large group of people do not agree with the direction the Lemmy devs are making, why not get together and create a new site forked off Lemmy's source code?
It seems like the fediverse is a return to a more liquid internet, similar to the early internet of the 90s. A lack of existing large infrastructure here is actually advantageous for new sites to startup.
With respect, maybe you shouldn't be commenting on what's going on behind the scenes. They are good developers but they're not good leaders or shepherds of such a big project. They need to hand over stewardship to someone that can be trusted.
Sometimes things become bigger than just what they were before, take on a life of their own.
When it gets to a humanity community level need then maybe the devs should turn it over to others who can do that, or at least accept the help of others who have been trying to help them grow it more/better.
We have a responsibility to ourselves, but we also have a responsibility to each other.
Sounds like you should fork it.
I would love to contribute but I don't have the experience for a fork. This is kind of the essence of the whole problem though. Plenty of unutilized contributors who could be driving this project forward but are having a hard time getting involved.
This sort of thing happens in every opensource project; the maintainer(s) have a vision for the product and whatever amount of time they can use to review contributions and PRs. Some PRs are utter messes, some are good but complex, others are good but either are not going to be supportable with the current manpower or will be superceded by codebase changes in the future. And then these contributors get upset their PRs aren't being taken seriously. They as well are welcome to fork it and they could even use patches from the original branch as they develop their forks, and presumably implement them in production. But more often than not, they just move on because they don't have much invested.
It's every maintainers balance that has to be determined, and not everyone is going to be happy. They might want a slow development pace because fast paces require a lot of work to maintain. Simplistically saying "we need faster development to take advantage of surges in interest" is pointless if there's nobody that's willing to stand behind the extra QC and support those patches introduce. Drive-by patching is a huge issue because the contributors rarely stick around to fix bugs.
I mean isn't the criticism that they are literal communists.
You are free to fork and work on the software but I'm not seeing anyone doing it.
It seems to me they're saying Lemmy needs corporate backing to grow? Cause if they were so bothered by the opinions of the Lemmy devs they could simply use Kbin instead.
Well that or use an instance that isn't theirs, or doesn't even federate with theirs, or simply block theirs.🤔 I mean this is really throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I have no strong love for leninists/stalinists, and think they accomplish little other than making actual socialists look bad while not being socialist themselves. But I'm not that put off by them. They're generally fairly intellectually weak, and easy to maneuver around. Should you choose to interact with them.
They are talking about the people developing lemmy, not some petty fight with the admins of one specific instance.
The Lemmy devs have no power over instances they do not run themselves.
Other than writing the software that all of those instances use to stay up to date and in contact with each other, regardless of their federation status.
can't people just take the lemmy source code and make their own version of the lemmy api?
Sure, technically. But good luck getting anyone to use your version over the mass adopted one. And good luck fitting back in if they decide to take their fork in a direction you dont like, which isolates your instance further and further.
It's because the current version has nothing wrong with it. If the Lemmy devs should choose to sabotage the Lemmy software, you'd be surprised how easily that happens when it pisses off all the instances and their owners. Instances will simply refuse to upgrade. And like most things, eventually some fork will win the race to become the dominant fork and the current Lemmy devs would be essentially disowned. Different forks also doesn't necessarily mean API breaking changes, so different forks would have no issue communicating (at least for a while).
They can, that is what kbin is. They just want to complain and bitch about a non for profit and community run project by volunteers with wild expectations of corporate for free efficiency instead of doing anything
Kbin is not a good Lemmy replacement.
I'm not sure if this is what that person meant, but, usually it's on the original development team to handle outreach and building the identity of the software - in Lemmy's case, they have a bit of a not-great reputation... Even if they had the reach, that reputation hurts.
Having Mozilla - or any top tier foss-friendly company - kinda take the reins a bit would probably be good.
I'm not sure if Mozilla is the one for that job, they have their own issues with community relations. I wish they didn't because the world needs Firefox.
It's open source, anyone can fork the repo any time they want. The original devs won't like it but also there is bugger all they can do about it. It's just that it would be a full time job to take on and no one has the time.
The solution for capitalism-out-of-control is not more capitalism. The less big money players in the fediverse the better.
Mozilla is a non profit. The most "capitalist" they get is the Mozilla Corp a company owned by the foundation which is basically just for tax purposes. Having a big player in the fediverse helps.
They are funded by Google. I much prefer the "some random guys or whoever will fork their code" model of software for this sort of thing.
Google pays them to be the default search engine, they're not funded by Google.
Isn't that their main source of revenue?
The rights to search sure are, but it's more like Google happens to be the one paying it right now. It could be Microsoft or Yahoo or anyone.
Mozilla definitely needs to diversity better here, but the implication that they're "funded by google" is completely misleading.
I don't buy that what they are paid reflects the value of their search rights. Google has antitrust interest in the continued existence of Firefox, that's why they would pay them, doesn't matter what they say it's for.
Amen. Everything google touches turns to shit. Everything.
What we need is a bunch of small groups and companies. It isn't a problem if there isn't a giant centralization of power.
You don't see Salsa companies ruining tomatoes
lemmy and reddit are too niche. mozilla getting into mastodon or friendica is far better
God someone needs to help friendica. Mastodon and lemmy both have pretty decent ux. Friendica looks like it's from 2006.
One of those half-billion user niches, eh.
Yeah I've considered leaving Lemmy because of who is in charge of development right now. They were not ready for its sudden burst in popularity and are not handling it well.
Could you expand? How aren't they handling it well?
The biggest issues that have come up so far are moderation and database optimization. The moderation issue is significant enough that large instances have considered shutting down, but the database optimization thing is what really drives me crazy. It is absurdly expensive for hosts considering we only have 35k MAU (just one of our midsized instances should be able to host the whole userbase for the cost they currently pay) and it has been largely deprioritized to the point that contributors who have tried to fix it have been told off.
It’s one thing if it’s just a couple of devs working on the project and trying their best, it’s an entirely different thing when a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues. At this point a significant number of users have been lost because the devs have been largely unable to capitalize on previous waves on growth due to slow development.
Not to mention things like authorized fetch, which if fixed would ensure Lemmy/Mastodon interoperability and would effectively make Lemmy the go to place for groups on the fediverse. This would constitute a huge boost in engagement from the broader fediverse.
Because of all this Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.
Exhibit 1: https://programming.dev/post/5180682
Definitely seen arguments on bugzilla, should disqualify Mozilla too.
That post seems like an overreaction. Which makes me think that the linked GitHub issue is just the straw that broke the patience of the developer that has moved on. Which is fair, but their action to post an emotional and negative public announcement is as immature as the thing they're complaining about.
I am a dev, but not a Rust dev.
Rust, Go, and C# look like the future to me. Everyone is moving to strongly typed, explicitly typed languages for a reason.
Rust is as fast as it gets, and much much safer and easier than C or C++ at the cost of slightly odder syntax than higher level languages.
Microsoft has done great things with C# and open source and multi-platforming. It's the easiest, quickest, safest way to develop business applications. The performance is really pretty good until you compare it to Rust.
Go is between the two, but probably a little closer to Rust.
Other languages will stick around the same way Fortran has still been in use despite being deprecated for 30 years. But really nobody should be developing anything new in PHP.
Lol, this was what I was going to link to
Yeah, that's a major fuckup from Snowe.
@AdmiralShat @Kushan It's federated right? so you don't need to leave, just move on to a different federated server in the network.. or am I missing something?
It's the developers of the software itself, not the hosts of any particular instanve.
Oh snap, as someone who's recently joined, do you have some information you could point me to?
Time for a repo fork?
You can have as many forks as you want, but that's a software engineer's solution to a social problem. Lemmy is the "name brand" now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation, and it will be orders of magnitudes more difficult to get support for forks, both from a contributor and from a user perspective.
Just look at last year's Twitter migration, and the sea of people complaining about Mastodon not having features they felt were a requirement for adoption, while also ignoring every other Mastodon alternative on the Fediverse that had everything they were looking for.
Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.
Specifically, the model should be the Wikimedia Foundation. That is, a non-profit organization with lots of stakeholders and slow procedures to guarantee accountability, and lots of resources to guarantee it won't go away. This is the pragmatic least-bad solution to the problem of centralization on the internet.
Wikipedia Foundation is also bloated and unfocused outside of their mainstay product. But like Mozilla, they generally do good with the bloat and unfocused resources. Inefficiencies are easy to identify but hard to mitigate.
Yes, bloat and mission creep is going to be an issue with any big non-profit. But maybe that's also their advantage: any organization that becomes focused on sustaining itself is going to provide decent long-term stability. I guess it's a bit like a state.
What do you mean? I haven't followed the development directly, I've just been a user and so far things seem to be going pretty well. Curious what shortsightedness you are talking about?
I think Mozilla has poor judgment and bad leadership. I don't mind if they participate but they shouldn't be in charge