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.
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.
The ethos of Mozilla
That’s the thing that changed.
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
Bring back Netscape!
I just want something rust based
Have you tried putting your cast iron in the dishwasher?
Don’t bother. Just leave it on the sink with some water.
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.
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.
Endless feature creep made browsers are the most complex programs ran by most users. I disbelieve a new browser could be made (securely, or at all). Forks are nice (I use Librewolf btw) but they do not deviate significantly. The browser market is unhealthy and unrecoverable: either it’s Google vs Firefox forever or one wins.
Perhaps the alternative to the all-in-one software solution is just to use smaller programs dedicated to each common use of the modern browser (a video player for playing video, an old style internet text-page reader for browsing text, etc).
True, but it probably won’t work. Unless the browser pulls them in as plugins and becomes modular. Most are trying to give a rich web experience out of the box and I’m not sure users will accept different programs for different things.
I really like Gemini as an idea and hope it finds it’s groove for many, but lots of mainstream users may not like it and the ad industry that people are using to fund there sites certainly won’t.
The fate of Mozilla is sad, I know one day they will announce a move to chromium.
why the fuck would they kill the thing that makes them money? Do you even understand what you are implying here??
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.
