Mozilla Exits the Fediverse, Will Shutter Its Mastodon Server In December (techcrunch.com) 61
Mozilla is exiting the fediverse by shutting down its Mozilla.social Mastodon server on December 17. Moving forward, the company will focus on Firefox and AI, aligning with its strategy under interim CEO Laura Chambers to scale back investments in non-core products. TechCrunch reports: Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users at the time of Tuesday's announcement. By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users. Mozilla had telegraphed its plans to scale back on its fediverse investments earlier this year after the CEO stepped down. At the time, Mozilla board member Laura Chambers took over the job as the interim CEO of Mozilla Corporation through the end of 2024. Shortly after the change in leadership, Mozilla said it would refocus its product strategy around Firefox and AI and significantly scale back or even shutter other efforts. Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down.
The redirection of Mozilla's efforts came after its flagship product, the Firefox web browser, spent years losing market share. That left room for other competitors, like the startup Arc, to take hold in the alternative browser market. Months prior to this change in strategy, Mozilla had been touting the fediverse's potential, but under Chambers, the company said that a more "modest approach" to the fediverse would have allowed it to participate with "greater agility." In an internal memo, Mozilla signaled that going forward, a "much smaller team" would participate in the Mastodon ecosystem. However, it didn't say at the time that the Mozilla.social instance would shut down, adding that it would continue to bring small experiments to those who participated on its instance. Mozilla said it was a "hard decision."
"Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta. You can continue to use Mozilla.social until December 17," a post on Mastodon reads. Users can download their data or migrate their accounts at the respective links.
The redirection of Mozilla's efforts came after its flagship product, the Firefox web browser, spent years losing market share. That left room for other competitors, like the startup Arc, to take hold in the alternative browser market. Months prior to this change in strategy, Mozilla had been touting the fediverse's potential, but under Chambers, the company said that a more "modest approach" to the fediverse would have allowed it to participate with "greater agility." In an internal memo, Mozilla signaled that going forward, a "much smaller team" would participate in the Mastodon ecosystem. However, it didn't say at the time that the Mozilla.social instance would shut down, adding that it would continue to bring small experiments to those who participated on its instance. Mozilla said it was a "hard decision."
"Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta. You can continue to use Mozilla.social until December 17," a post on Mastodon reads. Users can download their data or migrate their accounts at the respective links.
Huh (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't even know it existed.
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Probably the reason why it is shutting down.
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Bad guess
Looks spot-on to me. I can fill out my "MAGAt" bingo card with this post alone!
Re:Mom cut off their internet access for bad grade (Score:4, Informative)
Except you're not a mind reader and neither is that other dumbfuck. If you want to know what I think you can ask.
I doesn't take a psychic to puzzle out your beliefs. We can see the things you've written, after all.
You say you're "not a Trumper", but you say all of the same things they do and espouse all of the same beliefs.
You're either delusional, a liar, or both. I'm guessing both. That's typical of MAGAts.
Re: Mom cut off their internet access for bad grad (Score:2)
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Basically if you're more conservative than most Americans, but you're not MAGA, then you're a mainstream Democrat.
Yeah you sound like a real political genius. With word salad nonsense like that, I don't suppose you get a lot of argument. Then again, anyone who uses "MAGA" in a debate is probably going to be a simple minded partisan asshole. Thanks for not changing any of my biases, either, tough guy.
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So it sounds like you have problems with popular mastodon instances (who could have guessed someone with such an amazing personality would experience difficulty?).
Fortunately you can run your own instance and make your own rules.
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On the contrary, the beauty of Mastodon is that anyone can create their own server with their own rules, and join the Fediverse. Of course nobody else is obliged to federate with your server, but there are plenty of free speech focused ones out there who all federate each other.
Users can choose as well, by creating accounts on multiple servers. Many Mastodon clients support multiple accounts to aid with this.
What people are complaining about is that not enough people aren't choosing to to view their content
Nonsensical punchline (Score:5, Informative)
If it was a "closed beta" it would seem it was mostly just a Mastodon server for project members. This summary reads as being written by someone who has no idea how Mastodon, or the broader fediverse, works. One of the primary design goals of fediverse development is portability. i.e. if your provider decides they don't want to run the server anymore, it is 100% possible to just migrate to another server and maintain all of your post history and contacts. I think the implications of this concept are entirely lost on people used to the lock-in-driven models of the commercial social media providers.
I think it's OK for the mozilla foundation to try some things out and then drop off if the center of mass in that topic ends up being elsewhere in the community. But it would seem to me that has relatively little to do with Mastodon and mostly to do with some of the other projects mentioned. It's ok. They can choose their priorities, and quality firefox is their obvious priority. And they have had a decent footprint on truly open machine training ("AI") and that is probably a place where they can have a bigger impact per unit of developer effort.
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Mastodon gives server operators the ability to "moderate" content coming from elsewhere in the Fediverse, set instance-wide policies, and enable trigger warnings and visibility control (sh
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It makes more sense if people run your own instance because accounts are tied to instances but Bluesky is intended to fix all the problem you mention.
It's not impossible that Mozilla sees this.
Re:Nonsensical punchline (Score:5, Informative)
folks who are angry at Twitter for not censoring enough
LOL, Wut? Musk is the undisputed king of censorship. He bans people for making fun of him. He bans people for disagreeing with him. He even bans professional journalists.
If you think that Musk is some sort of "free speech absolutist", you're completely delusional.
This isn't surprising. Every right-wing Twitter replacement, including Twitter, very quickly goes from being a "free speech haven" to a far-right echo-chamber that bans anyone even suspected of holding an opposing view!
It turns out that, like most things, folks on the right don't understand free speech. You crackpots just want to say whatever you want unchallenged and without consequence. That is not free speech. It is the very opposite of free speech because such a thing demands draconian censorship.
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If you think that Musk is some sort of "free speech absolutist", you're completely delusional.
I think Musk is an egotistical billionaire. He's obviously censoring people he doesn't like such as the guy who was cyber-stalking his plane. You're mistaking me for a fanboy. I take the good with the bad.
Every right-wing Twitter replacement, including Twitter, very quickly goes from being a "free speech haven" to a far-right echo-chamber that bans anyone even suspected of holding an opposing view!
Well, since Agrawal's Twitter censored everyone in sight, had hundreds of "moderators" (we know this because Elon fired them), and banned folks for even mentioning they didn't like masks or that the CV19 vaccine couldn't prevent the disease. There were hundreds of them. It was extremely pervasive. Yes, Mus
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Oh really? Because you say it isn't?
No, because that isn't free speech. Your version of free speech, which I neatly explained, demands draconian censorship.
ChatGPT claims
I knew you were stupid, but I had no idea you were this stupid! Citing ChatGPT... OMG...
LOL! You're such a joke. Enjoy your ignorance. I'm clearly wasting my time here.
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We need censorship to avoid censorship? Wow, can't make this stuff up folks.
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No one is making that claim. Learn how to read.
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Hah, okay. I did, and it still looks like you want to censor people to avoid the need for "draconian censorship" but hey, whatever mang. You do you.
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Those are some good design principles and what sounds like a solid plan. However, I'd say Mastodon has a PR problem if you care about it's future. That is to say that it seems wholly made up of folks who are angry at Twitter for not censoring enough (or perhaps being bought out before they could continue to be censors). Mastodon gives server operators the ability to "moderate" content coming from elsewhere in the Fediverse, set instance-wide policies, and enable trigger warnings and visibility control (shadowbanning). I'd say this was the big appeal to it's operator base. They wanted to take their toys and leave Twitter while gaining more control over content "moderation". Sounds like rather than truly empowering free speech, they wanted a woke little walled garden to have tea with other "progressives" while making sure they could smash any right-wingers who dared to show up.
Alt-take: You didn't notice Mastodon until Twitter began its de-evolution into Musk's echo-chamber, then went only to the instances that people who wanted to leave Twitter went to and were upset that the people didn't leave Twitter for the exact same reasons you left it. Now you preach that all of Mastodon is censorship central because you disagreed with the particular form of moderation these other ex-Twitterers were using. Go poke around a bit. It's not all Twitter's lost children that all want a pat on t
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Actually, I never bothered with Mastodon at all. I'm only annoyed with the ones that keep talking about it as an alternative to mean-tweets and looking at it's around-1%-of-Twitter size. I'll take you're "It's not all I'm-moving-to-Canada progressive-types" under advisement. However, it was sold as sort of a FIDONET on steroids and I'm not buying that. The timing of when Mastodon blew up was too close to the liberation of Twitter.
Mastodon was around a long time before Twitter went haywire under Musk. And it was far from the only fringe service to pick up users during that little bit of societal weirdness.
It does seem you follow the twitter/x-verse. Perhaps that's why your perception is that Mastodon is a haven for wanna-be censors. You're only getting the story from the perspective of the "help me, I'm being oppressed by wrong-think" Twitter exodus.
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I think you said that better than I did :-)
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I can't tell if you're pretending to be ignorant, or just are.
However, I'd say Mastodon has a PR problem if you care about it's future. That is to say that it seems wholly made up of folks who are angry at Twitter for not censoring enough (or perhaps being bought out before they could continue to be censors).
You do realize that Mastodon is software, and that the Fediverse is made up of instances of such servers, and each server may set their own standards and rules, and users can join one or more servers to be part of multiple communities or federate and post/read across them, do you not?
When you say Mastodon has a PR problem, and excuse me for trying to make sense of this, I think you mean that some instances of it may have a PR problem. Because you
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You do realize that Mastodon is [...]
First let me say that "yes, I do realize those things" from your laundry list. I'll also point out that I haven't used Mastodon and I'm going purely on the "I'm leaving Slashdot and Twitter and moving to Mastodon" user experiences I've seen here and elsewhere (mostly Twitter/X) and the software description on the Wikipedia page for it. So, I'll admit that I'm only going on a vague impression and not really being fair to Mastodon or it's user base.
You have commented below on the censoring that Musk has done, and though you don't find it ideal, you seem to be fine with that amount of it.
I'm not really "fine" with it and do find it pretty repulsive
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They wanted to take their toys and leave Twitter while gaining more control over content "moderation".
No, or they wouldn't be users. They want an environment that suits their needs and maybe moderation that reflects it.
That doesn't really make sense to me. You're saying they wouldn't be users if they wanted more moderation (read: censorship) over the content and the reason is because the Mastodon platform gives them exactly those tools and control? What am I missing?
NOTE: "gaining more control over content moderation" versus "wanted more moderation".
I'm saying they didn't want more control over moderation, because users don't really get to control the moderation.
Twitter provides all users with the same content moderation/censorship/blocking/mutes/etc.. be it the level just prior to Musk taking over, or what it is now. Same applies to Slashdot - whatever moderation is done is reflected the same to all users - though users can tweak what scores they want to see, the scor
Arc (Score:5, Insightful)
>"That left room for other competitors, like the startup Arc, to take hold in the alternative browser market"
Arc is just "yet another Chrom*" browser (like Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Epic, Colibri, Yandex, Thorium, Wave, etc, etc, etc). I would hardly call it much of an alternative. Certainly not if you care about keeping power/control out of the hands of Google. The engine will suffer from the same exploits, follow the same mandates and pseudo-standards that Google invents, and continue everyone down the very dangerous monoculture road.
What we need are more strong, actual alternatives, like Firefox. What we don't need are more UI's on top of Chromium.
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Mastodon is doomed to fail, perhaps, because of the fact that is trying to be better than pure shit (Twitter/X or FB or Instagram etc.). The whole "social" media concept needs to be reinvented. It's value to users is truly nil.
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Mastodon is a nice place to be. You control what you see, not some algorithm tuned to make you angry and engaged. The way servers work creates a friendly community atmosphere.
It may never reach the levels of Twitter at the height of its popularity, but it's a nice place to be if you want a social experience.
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So what you're saying is every Chrome user should just use Edge? Or does that sound stupid and force you to acknowledge that just because the rendering engine is the same that there are actually still large differences between browsers?
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No, I am not saying that. There are differences between the various Chrom* browsers. But, overall, those differences are mostly the UI, which are mostly superficial. With the core of the browser being essentially identical and completely under Google's control, they augment Google's power and present only an illusion of browser diversity.
...and AI (Score:5, Informative)
Mozilla just needs to make a browser which is crap-free (no sponsored links, no Pocket, no weird partnerships) which blocks advertising and other commonly unwanted elements without mercy, utilising everything the community has already built to aid in getting things started. Instead of merely promising to protect users, they should actually do it, and get proposing standards to allow browsers to opt-out of seeing algorithmically-generated content entirely, setting theirs to do this by default.
This would differentiate them from "Orange Chromium" and "Red Chromium" in the eyes of ordinary users, perhaps giving them a fighting chance at competing.
Re:...and AI (Score:5, Insightful)
While that sounds great, where does the revenue come from in that model?
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Re:where does the revenue come from (Score:3)
Google subsidy as usual.
That's what turned Mozilla into a "very individually profitable" non-profit with no economic incentive to care about the browser.
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Not sure why anyone expects Mozilla to do those things. It would be easier to just "fork " Firefox, package a script to install something like ublock Origin (or whatever) during the install, and call it a day. Oh yeah and maybe disable the default telemetry blah blah blah.
I'm sure somebody's already done that but for whatever reason that isn't setting the world on fire.
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Or someone take their source codes and make their own web browsers. Phoenix v2.0!
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Mozilla just needs to make a browser which is crap-free (no sponsored links, no Pocket, no weird partnerships) which blocks advertising and other commonly unwanted elements without mercy, utilising everything the community has already built to aid in getting things started.
How does this bring in users? I mean we all know such browsers exist out there - largely forks of earlier Firefox builds. But they all have *checks notes* fuck-all user base.
If users (the mass use of the term, not you specifically) actually cared about this then Chrome wouldn't be the world's most popular browser.
yes but no (Score:5, Interesting)
YES!!!
God damn it! What the fuck?!
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> God damn it! What the fuck?!
There's nobody left who knows how to fix the 22-yr-old bugs.
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God damn it! What the fuck?!
Need a revenue stream to pay for the browser they are giving away for free.
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I wonder how long they could go with no additional revenue if they canned the C-suite entirely and used that money for something useful.
Oh dear (Score:2)
"scale back on its fediverse investments" (Score:3)
What the heck? Running a fediverse server is trivial. What kind of company says, "We're SO BAD at tech that running a basic, simple server requires so much money, because we really suck at this Internet stuff, that we have to pivot away from doing that to save that money"?
This just gives the impression that Firefox is completely out of touch with tech and with the Internet. I'm embarrassed for them, but more than that, I'm scared for them. Imagine trusting a browser that has people running it that can't or won't allow the continuation of a service that'd literally be a rounding error of load on an existing server?
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Or maybe they're publicly distancing themselves from the Fediverse.
Well it's Mozilla (Score:2)
Is it cool?
Is it community-oriented?
Will the users like it?
Should we focus on this or that important issue?
Let's do the other thing instead.
sense (Score:3)
It make sense to close a service with only 270 active users. Also, I applaud they focusing on Firefox and abandoning useless ventures, just please keep up Thunderbird and Let's Encrypt.
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With 270 active users, I guess they can run the service on a relatively cheap VPS. 35-70 bucks a month cost?
Probably costs a bit more on admin time to make sure its updated, secure, etc. But otherwise, how much does this actually save them monthly if they shut this down?
Side note : what happened with Multiverse ? (Score:2)