Mozilla (@[email protected])
mozilla.social
We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024. 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. Before that date, you can download your data here (https://mozilla.social/settings/export), and migrate your account to another instance following these instructions (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozilla-social-faq).
  • Vipsu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    964·
    2 months ago

    Lemmy support would be much more fitting for Mozilla. They could add plugin or lemmy integration to their browser that could show discussions from subscribed communities matching the current url.

    Effectively acting as a “comment section” but for any page. One would only need lemmy account to comment on youtube videos, news articles, blogs etc.

    • mke@programming.devEnglish
      412·
      2 months ago

      I didn’t want to rain on your parade, but:

      • Firefox has hundreds of millions of users.
      • Lemmy has less than half a million total users, and YTD MAU peaked at 52k.

      Even putting aside technical details, I fail to see how “Lemmy integration in the browser” could be a good product strategy. A plugin/extension can also be developed by independent developers, which seems much more fitting for the size of the target demographic. Maybe I’m missing something.

      • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
        91·
        2 months ago

        Yeah, something like 50k users is a drop in the bucket. It’s a nice size for a community, but not big enough to warrant a browser feature.

      • Vipsu@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        2 months ago

        Well since they were/are hosting Mastodon instance they do seem to have some interest in the fediverse. They do also have official plugins.

        Personally I feel something like this could be the next step for social link aggregation and discussion platforms. Being able to share and discuss on about videos and articles without having to register to dozens or more pages while also having some control over the people you interract with through instances, subscribed communities etc.

        Source media would also be unable to control what can or cannot be discussed. Many youtube videos and news articles for example may block all comments. It would be up to community on how to moderate discussion.

    • Clbull@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      Gab tried to pull the same thing with their Dissenter plugin. It was such a bad idea that Mozilla and Google banded together to remove the extensions from their stores for ToS violations.

      Now imagine what a nightmare it would be to moderate the ability to comment on anything online with actual standards and decency.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        2 months ago

        Why was it a bad idea? Seems like a wonderful idea. Minus Gab.

        Some kind of web of trust and inheriting ignored users based on it and weights - and it will work.

        • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
          6·
          2 months ago

          Sounds to me like an extension that by design tracks every Web page you visit.

          • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Not necessarily and only those you comment.

            That’s the point, to comment any webpage. It’s clear you visited it if you comment it.

            • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
              2·
              2 months ago

              Presumably it loads comments when you visit a page. That would send a request with the URL to whatever service they’re running.

              • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                2 months ago

                Unless you make a p2p system and search comments by page hash in some way (maybe just over I2P?) making it hard for other nodes to understand from which node it comes and which node downloads those comments.

                OK, I agree. Not very good. But in theory it can be better.

  • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
    851·
    2 months ago

    I didn’t use it but the lack of an explanation is a frustrating response. Give feedback to the feedback??

    • Virkkunen@fedia.io
      563·
      2 months ago

      They’re a small indie company and they need the server power to run the AI in Firefox

      • Kusimulkku@lemm.eeEnglish
        12·
        2 months ago

        I don’t think Firefox has any AI that they need to run for you. The language thing (if that counts) is local thing.

        • Virkkunen@fedia.io
          205·
          2 months ago

          It was a joke about how it seems they’re putting most, if not all, efforts into their AI

  • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
    516·
    2 months ago

    Good. Stop fucking around, focus on the browser. If they can make it provide value that Google can’t, they are succeeding. Google cant compete in privacy.

    • YtA4QCam2A9j7EfTgHrH@infosec.pubEnglish
      3315·
      2 months ago

      They are dropping it to focus on the important shit. Forcing bullshit genai stuff into their browser and working on adtech.

      • Kusimulkku@lemm.eeEnglish
        213·
        2 months ago

        Forcing bullshit genai stuff into their browser

        It’s an opt-in feature that just opens whatever AI service you picked, their website in a sidebar. You can even use your own local AI if you want to. Or not use it at all. But the AI isn’t actually in your browser any more than it is in your browser when you open their website in a tab.

        If the translation thing counts as AI then that’s actually a really cool and more private use of it compared to querying a server. It can do the translation completely locally. Works pretty well too in my experience, though it does think for a moment when you tell it to translate.

  • ZephyrXero@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6218·
    2 months ago

    Sigh, so is Mozilla just like Google now? Can’t trust any services to stick around?

    • almar_quigley@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      2 months ago

      It’s a mastodon server. I don’t want them spending money on that anyways. They should be focusing on the browser, not social media infrastructure.

      • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Exactly. They should be dropping anything that isn’t revenue positive or isn’t furthering the goals of browser. Rust is a great project because it’s being used directly in the browser. Mastodon isn’t, because it has no relationship to their browser efforts. I’m on the fence about the VPN, but if it’s revenue positive, it should probably stick around, and it sort of benefits the browser as well.

        • progandy@feddit.orgEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          The VPN is really not much more than white labelled mullvad + the browser extension with separate VPN servers per container.

          • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Right, and if it’s not profitable, it should be scrapped, but if it pays for itself, I see no harm in keeping it.

      • Juniper (she/her) 🫐@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        233·
        2 months ago

        The majority of those are nothing burgers. They shut down their dedicated password app when they integrated its features into the browser, they shut down their encrypted file sharing tool when they realized it was being used for very nefarious uses, they shut down Positron and it’s affiliated projects because nobody started using it over Electron… and a lot of the rest are extremely niche (like viewing websites in 3d, cool but not all that useful).

        • TJA!English
          61·
          2 months ago

          The same now with mozilla.social. nobody is using it

          • infeeeee@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            2 months ago

            Was it even a goal? Mastodon can be used for internal communication, e.g. https://social.kernel.org is only for linux developers, and I know a local university where they have a defederated mastodon instance where every student automatically got registered.

            If they just needed it for posting news maybe simply having a profile on one of the big instances would be enough. I see they had only 270 users.

          • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
            22·
            2 months ago

            “Its” has been deprecated.

            “It’s” follows the rule for contractions with words ending in “s” (is, has) as well as the apostrophe-s rule for possessive forms. As you have demonstrated, the distinction is obvious in context; there is no significant opportunity for confusion.

            Keeping the old form does nothing for society other than to inflate the egos of authoritarian English teachers, provide an opportunity for pedantry, confuse spell checkers, and introduce an unneeded exception to the possessive form. Nothing of value is lost by eliminating the old word.

            So, “It’s” is a homonym: two words spelled and pronounced the same, but carrying different meanings.

    • Zier@fedia.io
      25·
      2 months ago

      Yes. And add microsoft to that category. Firefox will kill itself off.

  • xenoclast@lemmy.worldEnglish
    352·
    2 months ago

    Until they change CEOs again. I wonder what it’d be like to not have corporate parasites everywhere

    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      551·
      2 months ago

      I mean, maintaining an instance is a larger job than having a twitter account. I don’t think they’re all that comparable.

    • mke@programming.devEnglish
      153·
      2 months ago

      Yes, I think that’s natural. A large segment of their market is still there. Throwing away years of work when the accounts cost relatively little to maintain would be wasteful. I don’t see how their presence there is relevant to this discussion.

        • mke@programming.devEnglish
          7·
          2 months ago

          Sorta. Only as a discussion starter, if you wanted. I was unsure how to frame my thoughts without being rude, but it seems I ended up being confusing instead. I’ll edit my comment to try again, please try to read it in its intended spirit.

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.eeEnglish
    17·
    2 months ago

    Do they at least have an account on someone else’s instance then? If they do, it’s fine for them to not have to spend resources on maintaining their own.

    • ChatGPT@lemmings.worldBEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      It seems like there is no user named “Mozilla” on the lemmy.world instance. However, Mozilla does have a variety of other projects and services apart from Firefox and Thunderbird, such as:

      1. Mozilla Matrix: Mozilla operates an instance of the Matrix chat protocol. You can join and communicate on their Matrix channels.
      2. Mozilla VPN: A virtual private network service.
      3. Pocket: An application for managing a reading list of articles from the web.
      4. Common Voice: A project to help make voice recognition open and accessible to everyone.
      5. MDN Web Docs: Documentation for web technologies, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

      For more detailed information, you might want to visit the Mozilla website or their GitHub repository.