MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has
MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has
I think the fediverse has a better chance of doing more good, and Mozilla should’ve stuck with it.
But they did stick with it, AFAIK? They just took down their mastodon instance, that’s absolutely not the same thing. Unless you mean to imply that all of us here, using this but not running our own instance, are also “not sticking it up for the Fediverse” or so.
Plus, let’s not forget that by their underlying nature, Reddit and Twitter are not ad-driven via the ads shown directly. The real ads are in astroturfing, promotions and subtle pushing of products and ideas. And Lemmy, Mastodon, et al are just as susceptible to that, if not more so, lacking a usable central authority to curb such behavior if wanted.
It wasn’t meant to be just an ordinary mastodon instance they were running. Nobody seems to be saying exactly what was being worked on, but judging by what was said in the various press releases and so on they were trying to reinvent social media. It sounded like some kind of giant ambitious project that failed. Perhaps a bit too ambitious, then. If it continues in some other form I’m unaware of it.
But outside of whatever that was, they haven’t done even what one would think of as the bare minimum when it comes to federated social media. The CEO never had even a mastodon account, so far as we know. I would check once in a while to see if that had changed, before eventually giving up. Their home page still invites us to “follow @mozilla” at exclusively at the usual places such as twitter and instragram.
Their hamfisted attempts to appear to be actively on the side of addressing the problems of contemporary social media were not well-received, their mastodon fork must’ve got mismanaged into some kind of impenetrable morass, so they walked away from the whole thing and are on to the next brilliant idea.
You know the fediverse doesn’t make its own browser right
It serves here as an example of what an Internet without ads might look like. Mozilla has the kind of resources that could’ve really helped its development if they’d been capable and determined enough to succeed in turning whatever crazy project they had in mind when they launched mozilla.social into something practical. If they’d built something good it could have earned them much goodwill and prestige, maybe brought in a little money somehow or other, and gone some way to ridding the Internet of the infestation of adtech that currently afflicts it.
“somehow or other” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Not really. It’s just an aside for the bean-counters.
… but you know, it’s not difficult to think of possibilities. They could have a shiny new line of business providing hosting, spam detection, admin, support, moderation, and other services for whatever new and improved flavour of fedi instances they can create in accordance with all the principles they used to talk about. They could use their marketing team, their money and connections, to become the provider of choice for corporations, governments, and NGOs who don’t yet realize that they need their own instance.
Would’ve been worth a try. Instead, after so much fanfare, they ran a small mastodon instance for a little while and then cancelled the project. I suppose it’s likely that the same kind of fate will befall the new ad tracking stuff before too long.
Maybe the fediverse could define a limited subset of web standards, such that creating an alternative browser capable of rendering all services remains tractable.