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... "
I like Mozilla, I respect their mission and their good nature. I can’t help but feel the billions they receive from Google make it too easy for them to be, at best, unfocused and, at worst, lazy. They offer a lot of random services like this. I fear this play is just chasing another possible mediocre revenue generator for them. Like pocket, like Mozilla vpn and private relay, etc.
Maintaining a web browser is an intensely cost and time prohibitive endeavor, especially nowadays. The FOSS community can maintain a lot of things but the sheer scale of Firefox, the need for expertise, the necessary labor, it just can't be done by volunteers and donations, at least not without using Chromium. They have to get a cash infusion from somewhere.
I don't like it anymore than you do but ultimately the issue isn't Mozilla, it's the state of the technology market. Silicon Valley is no place for a non-profit organization right now, no matter how much we need it.
What we need is regulations and anti-trust, but even that may not truly save us.
They need money. That's it. That's the long and short of it.
If you're interested in donating, go to https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/?form=donate
Those donations cannot be used for Firefox development due to the structure of Mozilla.
I'm not entirely sure that's true. The money goes to Mozilla and Mozilla will use it to fund Firefox (and other projects). It seems to work exactly how one would expect it to work - you just can't donate directly to a project such as Firefox.
There are limits to how much money they can move to projects due to their structure as a 501(c)3, (but all of their projects are towards an open web) so maybe not all of the funding goes to Firefox, but it still does go to Firefox.
Firefox is part of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation. Donations go to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. Even though Mozilla Corporation is owned by Mozilla Foundation, donations cannot be transferred to it since it is still legally a for-profit business. The funds donated to Mozilla Foundation are used for advocacy work.
I get paid next week and will definitely be donating, thank you for the link!
What's stopping web standards from being made simple or unchanging enough for a smaller project to maintain a functional web browser?
At this point the web is about as complex as an operating system in terms of complexity. That needs really strong specific standards in order for it to work, and in turn projects like web browsers are huge and complex.
If someone wanted to build a web browser that only followed the simpler parts of the specifications, it wouldn't work for many websites* and people would not use that browser.
*Whether or not sites need to be so complex is another question entirely, but the reality right now is that they are
Occasionally when I do web stuff I look into the big frameworks but quickly get overwhelmed and go back to simple html/css/js, so yeah I kind of just don't get what the point is or why anyone needs or wants complexity there. Large websites always do most stuff serverside anyway it seems, so where is this complexity even getting used? It is very mysterious to me. Suspect Google etc. are pushing stuff no one needs in this regard as well to move the web towards something only they can handle.
There's a very large number of DOM and browser APIs now though... Even with basic JS without libraries or frameworks, you can still build fancy 2D and 3D graphics (WebGL), interact with USB devices, allow input via game controllers, stream H264 video, implement custom caching, use push notifications, and a bunch of other things. The web browser has to implement all of that complexity. They're all useful in different scenarios.
That's a good point, I guess I haven't been too aware of all that stuff.
This seems like a reasonable and insightful take. Is there a way a non-profit could still survive in silicon valley? For ex, IETF isn't a profit focused organization.
I'm not sure if this qualifies exactly but the FOSS 3D package Blender has been surviving for quite some time. They're in Amsterdam, not silicon valley, but they seem to do really well off primarily donations and funding from some big companies.
I think the key there is funding from big companies. There's tons of standards and the like in which big companies take part - both in terms of code and financial support. Big projects like the rust compiler, the Linux kernel, blender, etc. all seem to have a lot of code and money coming in from big companies. Sadly there's only so much you can get from individuals - pretty much the only success story I know of is the wikimedia foundation.
I may be wrong but I thought they were majority user funded.
edit: looking at their funding reports it seems that way, but I may be misinterpreting it.
Wikimedia foundation is, none of the other things I listed are.
I meant Blender, they seem to be majority funded by regular people.
I just checked their financial report for 2022 and it looks like 50% came from patron funding (which looks like entirely companies like Google), 5% from epics grant, and then 10% corporate membership. 20% came from individuals, and the rest from random other miscellaneous things like the blender market. If you search blender foundation annual report 2022, the finances breakdown will be near the end of the slides.
Ahh, that was just me misunderstanding what patron meant, my bad.
It looks like on blender's website there's 6 entities on there, and one of them does seem to be an individual fwiw. Here's his website: https://aras-p.info/.
The rest all seem to be corporations though - meta, aws, some game company I've never heard of, AMD, and epic.
I hope they hit on something stand-out soon. To establish more sustainability. Seems like everything is in change right now.
What should they be doing instead? Begging for donations? I do agree in general, tho. Seems they should at least be squirreling away some (or most) of that money into a foundation, because they're obviously going to need it one day.
Would be great if they did not get money from google. They could set.up a donations program or something and regularly ask for it like Wikipedia. Donation based browser, peoples Browser.
You can donate to Mozilla, and I do. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/
A lot of people will have to donate a lot to equal the amount they are getting from Google though, and if Google pulls that money I feel that Firefox would end before people donate enough to make up the shortfall.
Money donated to Mozilla goes o ly ti the foundation. The money paid by Google goes to the Mozilla Corp (Firefox).
Asking for a donation would be a damn near fatal blow to retention and they know it. Given how its going with Google's anti-trust case though, they'll need to ask for money at some point.
I feel like this relationship of: one company pays a competitor to promote an unrelated product that could very reasonably be used to engage in anti-competitive behavior should at the very least be heavily regulated by the SEC, or possibly just outright prohibited. Alphabet is the epitome of the mega-corporation who has the resources to compete viciously in almost any industry, but has the breadth for plausible deniability about who their competition is.
"What? Mozilla isn't competition...browser? Oh you mean chrome? That little thing? Nah, we just do that on the side. We're an ad company."
Meanwhile: "What? Meta? You mean like Facebook? We don't compete with them, hah, remember Google+? They compete with TikTok...Oh ads? I guess so, but that's kind of a side thing. We do mobile os/web analytics/email/whatever."
Yeah revenue generator... They want a full name to get on the wait list, no reason for that except marketing.
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.
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).
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.
Amen. Everything google touches turns to shit. Everything.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
They're a bit late to the party, but better late than never...
not really social media is basically booming right now with the implosion of twitter
Better Nate than lever.
I hope there instance doesn't get really big. That would be a recipe for disaster especially since they don't seem to have a plan to financial stability
So it's moza?
It’s always amusing when someone say fediverse is good for the users, when fediverse gives zero right to the users. Pretty much every service in it is made with giving 100% of control to the admin. Admin can suspend and take down anything and any account without notice or explanation and user has no way of asking for an appeal. I mean yes. Fediverse is nice. I even run my own mastodon and Pixelfed instances. But please, let’s not fool ourselves. About Mozilla, they’re just being what they’ve been in recent years. Hypocrites. The company that claims to care about privacy, but implement privacy invasive settings and services (pocket) by default. And now they just want to create a platform focused on censorship. Thats why they’re interested in fediverse.
Shifting the power from a CEO to an instance admin is a massive improvement.
One has autocratic control over the entire site, potentially hundreds of millions of users, investors breathing down their neck, server infrastructure, and other systemic pressures; meanwhile, a fediverse instance admin has autocratic control over nothing but their own instance, a few thousand users at most, with the only money and hardware involved being their own.
The fediverse is incredibly more horizontal and decentralized than any corporate social media, the improvement is massive. And i'm a believer that vertical structures and concentrations of power are at the root of a lot of problems in society, so this is gravy to me.
But yes, it's worth remembering that it's not completely decentralized, and admins still have absolute power over their instance. My Mastodon instance admin doesn't want us to use the name GIMP to refer to the open source image manipulator; they say "gimp" is a slur aimed at disabled people, which i've never heard before in my life.
You can pick your own instance and switch later. It thus allows you to choose an admin/moderation team, something that’s impossible with traditional social media.
Not to mention you can self host and be your own admin.
Basic telemetry that users can easily opt out of after install is privacy-invasive to you?
Forum moderator? Mastodon admin? Same thing really.
Difference is that YOU CAN BE THE ADMIN whenever you want while still being able to talk to others. Over.