270 active users isn’t much for a masto instance.
Given that Mozilla is a small company, and small company’s really can’t afford to lose focus for the major roadmap initiatives, I’m going to bet that this was someone’s hackathon project.
Mozilla is a small company
I’m surprised that people consider a ~2000-person company that revenues about a half billion a year to be “small”. Mozilla is a profit-driven corporation, far separated from the vision of the hobbyist coders who founded it decades ago. The only reason they’re shutting down their Mastodon server is because it’s not making them money, not because they lack the resources to support it.
Still, 750 is totally not a small company, also they manage and host matrix/element, that are way more edgy in terms of technology, takes a LOT of time only for maintenance if you have bigs rooms :
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix
Choices are not neutrals and I don’t know what I would do at their seats, but I think it’s a bit sad that mozilla invest more into matrix/element instead political opinion makers like these social network xitter alternatives, fediverse & all <3
Maybe I don’t know shit and maybe Mastodon is also a heavy mess to selfhost !
Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the for-profit) are two different entities under the Mozilla umbrella, so their staffing may be reported differently depending where you look and how they’re counting it.
I don’t think Mozilla running a Mastodon server is losing focus. The ethos of Mozilla and the Fediverse have a lot of overlap, and Mozilla should desire to have a foot in it.
An official Mastodon server is also a useful platform for marketing and outreach. In contrast an organisation claiming to be all about privacy and open source retreating from a social media platform that embodies those is not a good look.
I think official instances should be fairly small, no? They shouldn’t allow users from outside Mozilla onto their instance. The point is that they federate and can interact with a wider audience from an official source.
The hell is with all these comments?
Mozilla is far from perfect but god damn the degree of hatred and mirth some people have is entirely disproportionate to anything they’ve actually done, and completely irrespective of the good they actually do.
It’s got the same energy as leftist purity testing, where there is no “net good”, only perfection and villains to be spat on.
It almost seems like there’s anti Mozilla campaign going on. It’s normal to see some critique but all of a sudden there is a huge Mozilla hate push. Call me crazy but it feels organized
There is, I just saw a post trying to demonize Mozilla simply because they had a few job listings for AI and Ad managers and the take away in the post itself was like “I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads”, like are you serious??? A few job listings is enough to paint the entire future of the company lol
I’m, like, yeah, some of the stuff Mozilla has done has been worrying, but I’ve seen far worse happen to some other open source projects and their corporate branches.
I’m not worried about Mozilla projects’ future. If LibreOffice survived corporate calcification, I see no reason why Mozilla projects wouldn’t, if the push comes to a shove. But the thing is, in my opinion, push hasn’t come to a shove yet. There’s red flags at best, which is a cause for concern, but that’s it.
The enshittification warning signs are going off everywhere, Mozilla is being corrupted before our very eyes. Now is not the time to hand wave it away.
Unfortunately with Google’s antitrust lawsuits, it’s quite likely Mozilla will lose the majority of their funding in the near future, since their biggest source of revenue is Google paying them to be default.
The fate of Mozilla is sad, I know one day they will announce a move to chromium. It might be after a buyout but they will switch chromium and than die
If they switch to Chromium they lose their half a billion per year from Google to be the token “look we’re not a monopoly here’s competition” browser.
Even if they did so, isn’t Firefox entirely open source? At least their work could be forked (though I agree if they don’t have the resources, hardly anyone else could make it)
Sure, but is Google gonna pay them or you hoping they will do that work for free? A browser doesn’t seem like a hobby project to me.
Yes, but neither do many of the large open source projects that aren’t funded by Google.
They can also use Yahoo or Bing as default for money.
The other option is diversify your revenue. Which is likely where the ad stuff comes in. If they can do that in a privacy respecting way with a facility to opt out, I have no objections. The loss of the biggest open source chromium alternative is massive and unthinkable.
For all the flaws of Mozilla, no one has forked, done better and put it out of business. It’s easier to run it behind a keyboard with zero responsibility.
Didn’t even know they had one
I think this kind of a good thing.
Those of us with long enough memories will remember a long tail of Mozilla building stuff and abandoning them, quite like Google.
The two that genuinely hurt me were:
- Firefox OS - honestly great. I still have my Firefox OS phone sitting around in a box somewhere.
- Mozilla Persona - an authentication service, was great and still better than the existing alternatives
But the reason I think this it is a good thing, is that they’re focusing on their core product. For me Firefox is superior in many ways to Chrome, Ad blocking is an immediate example of that. They need to keep Firefox being successful.
Another reason I think this is a good thing is that there must be new people coming to Mozilla and Firefox who don’t know the history. And it’s great that there are new people like that.
