Mozilla is shutting down their Mastodon instance.
Mozilla is shutting down their Mastodon instance.
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. Befo...
Rats…that company’s gonna miss out on all the fun.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
plugin/extension
that seems like the way to go for this
Wow that might actually be amazing. A comment section for every page?
I swear Lemmy comments for YouTube had a feature that let you open it for any page, but it seems the GitHub and Firefox page been deleted.
Edit: Looks like I've still got a fork: https://github.com/Steve-Tech/Reddit-Comments-for-YouTube (it says Reddit, but works for Lemmy too)
I didn't use it but the lack of an explanation is a frustrating response. Give feedback to the feedback??
Until they change CEOs again. I wonder what it'd be like to not have corporate parasites everywhere
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.
They are dropping it to focus on the important shit. Forcing bullshit genai stuff into their browser and working on adtech.
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.
Got to love ignorant hot tapes based on article headings.
what else does Mozilla have? matrix ? @[email protected]
Sigh, so is Mozilla just like Google now? Can't trust any services to stick around?
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.
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.
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).
Always has been
It is again beginning to feel rather dysfunctional..
Yes. And add microsoft to that category. Firefox will kill itself off.
They're still on Xitter, though.
I mean, maintaining an instance is a larger job than having a twitter account. I don't think they're all that comparable.
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.
You either die the hero
Oh no! Anyway…
Mozilla is only focusing on AI stuff.
I'm not sure why all the down-votes.. But I'm not lying.. Look at: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/mozilla-lays-off-60-people-wants-to-build-ai-into-firefox/. Or https://digiworld.news/news/65190/mozilla-invests-30m-to-launch-mozillaai-and-redefine-the-next-era-of-ai. There are literately millions invested into AI by Mozilla.
And they are mostly hiring AI engineers as well: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/careers/listings/
..
I'm assuming because they don't have those AI engineers. I don't agree with this or AI, but diversification isn't something that can be ignored.
They need to focus on browser and bet on things that could succeed in the future. Winding down those bets that failed (like 3d visual worlds) is sensible.
Of the 60 they are laying off, how many of those work on Firefox?
Not true at all lol
And locally-run translation that utilises AI, as well as AI accessibility features for blind users isn't nefarious. I mean, unless you dislike private translations and would rather send that data to Google, or hate blind people, but I'd hope you don't.
People need to actually look into features before they have a stupid and completely reactionary "it says AI therefore evil" response. People who react that way are morons.
What is not true? Mozilla is lay off people with a move to AI: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/mozilla-lays-off-60-people-wants-to-build-ai-into-firefox/. And invested millions into AI: https://digiworld.news/news/65190/mozilla-invests-30m-to-launch-mozillaai-and-redefine-the-next-era-of-ai. And are hiring a lot of AI engineers specifically: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/careers/listings/