I can’t say I ever really understood what Newsmast is up to, but Channel.org looks pretty nifty. It seems like a good way for organisations consisting of several independent people to get together and present all their federated content in one public channel.

The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.

In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.

Mozilla’s job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:

• Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
• Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
• Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
• Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
• Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
• Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
• Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab

For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I’m not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don’t think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.

There’s also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.

In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:

1. Buying into the AI hype
2. Flirting with “more ethical” ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user’s side of just blocking it all
3. Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
4. Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
5. Paying company leadership too much

I don’t really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it’s by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that’s pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.

The only redeeming feature about this is that it only looks about as awful as any other social media.

Which is not very redeeming at all, of course.

The comments on the post also aren’t from Mozilla.social. It’s not like they would have been happy to see Mozilla as a successful actor on the Fediverse either.

The trolls in the comment section at least hints at the fact that creating a more positive and constructive online space proved more difficult than they imagined.

I was curious, and joined the queue for the closed beta a long time ago. Never heard back. They explored something new in closed channels, decided not to go for it, backed out. I don’t really think they need to justify the decision.

Running a social media is a huge effort, and there’s a lot of trolls out there actively targeting Mozilla. I imagine it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

The official story is that Meta is worried about being sued by people suddenly seeing their content pushed to some random website without their consent if it’s enabled by default, so they won’t risk enabling it by default. At least not before the fediverse is huge enough that everything you post going everywhere on the internet is the expected behaviour.

Fair enough really. I wouldn’t want to be sued for that either, and they obviously cannot expect Congress to understand… anything.

They define decentralisation as an even distribution of users? Or did I get that wrong skimming the paper?

This seems arbitrary. Mastodon is a decentralised network, no matter how big Mastodon.social is. Lemmy is equally decentralised, even though there’s a dominant actor.

The other hubs in the network don’t revolve around mastodon.social/lemmy.world. they connect to each other bilaterally - if the central hubs disappeared over night it wouldn’t affect them all that much.

I think the notion that decentralised networks can’t have hubs of varying sizes is plain wrong, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what decentralized means.

It’s the Lemmy developers, who run Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml, who decided not to promote Lemmy.world on their “about Lemmy” website. This is completely unrelated to the admins of Lemmy.world. :)

Not of Lemmy.world, where you are writing from. And I’m not even writing you from Lemmy. :)

The developers of the platform are not in control over what it’s used for. Which is what’s neat about these place.

Most people are fine. All social media has some bad eggs - admittedly FOSS/GNU/Linux communities are prone to attract a specific breed of them. But they can generally be ignored pretty easily.

Very cool!

Do you be have any idea how tolling scraping these data is for the servers?

If this is something you want to keep working on, maybe it could be combined with a sort of Threadiverse fund raiser: we collectively gather funds to cover the cost of scraping (plus some for supporting the threadiverse, ideally), and once we reach the target you release the map based on the newest data and money is distributed proportionally to the different instances.

Maybe it’s a stupid idea, or maybe it would add too much pressure into the equation. But I think it could be fun! :)

Yeah, for sure. Doing something great doesn’t shield you from also making some really shitty decisions or holding some god-awful positions.

I just think it’s good to keep a nuance of language. Too many open source developers burn out, and a hostile community is listed as one of the reasons too often. There will always be disagreements, and there are valid ways of voicing it, but one should never forget that there is humans on the other side and remain kind. :)

The devs are working hard providing a public service that they make available for everyone. And the product they’ve developed is pretty impressive, in spite of its shortcomings.

They hold some opinions I disagree with pretty strongly, and I’m not a fan of every decision they make. But they’re creating a truly common good, and for that they deserve praise. From a technical perspective, they have created something completely new that serves thousands of users and constitutes a system of huge complexity. They very much do not suck.

Anyone who thinks any person maintaining an open source project “sucks” should feel free to fork the project, fix whatever they’re not happy with, and maintain the repository and handle commits and all the shit that goes down in managing a large open source project. After dedicating all this time to people, some random ingrate will inevitably disagree with some minor decision they’ve made and decide that they “suck”.

Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.

Lemmy.world is doing great and I’m happy for it and all that, but… 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.

I’m amazed at how fast this place has grown since the first time I saw a Lemmy instance (way before Reddit API drama), or since the first time I snooked around Mastodon (before Twitter exodus) for that matter. So I guess I’m inherently optimistic by the fact that where newer users might see little activity as a bad sign, I see a little activity as a huge improvement on what the status quo was not so long ago.

On a technical side, open source projects also tend not to benefit from growing too fast. It seems to me Fediverse platforms currently have a healthy activity level for the stage of completion they are in. Lemmy certainly grew faster than it could handle for a while, and arguably Mastodon suffered from the same.

The main reason I’m hopeful about the social web is, however, that it makes no sense any more to create a new platform that does not support it. No matter what kind of social networking site you’re making, proprietary or open, you’re going to want to make it ActivityPub enabled, simply because it gives you a user base right off the bat.

And furthermore, it encourages the development of new platforms, precisely because you don’t need to establish yourself with a whole bunch of users. According to fedidb my platform of choice, PieFed, has 124 active users right now. It would not have been a very interesting corner of the old web.

I don’t think the established user base here is going anywere, and I think future developments will feed into the ecosystem. So I’m pretty hopeful. But it is going to take time before all sorts of niche communities have made themselves a federated home.

Bluesky and Threads will fight it out over microblogging, while Mastodon will stick around as a smaller less corporate alternative. A year from now people on both platforms can probably follow my Mastodon handle anyway, so I don’t really care all that much.

Not considering the costs of hosting infrastructure for downloads, developing Fediverse integration in software is an extremely complicated task, and retrofitting it into existing software is no joke.

A more realistic starting point is probably to follow them on Mastodon, ( @Retromags@mstdn.plus ) interacting with their posts and trying to spread them, and to try to build up a fediverse presence for them. Then eventually, if they find that they get the majority of their interactions through the fediverse, they might consider merging their comment sections.

I think alternative social media needs to be decentralized. There’s just no other way it can be sustainable. Cohost was centralized - of course it couldn’t stand a chance. Never mind all the other issues, which are obviously equally important.

For me, the fact that we are having this conversation on the social web is solid evidence pointing in the opposite direction of your concerns. I counted contributors from eight different websites and at least three different software platforms only in this comment section of twelve comments.

Alternative social media platforms have never looked so healthy!

I gave in to peer pressure and finally got Twitter right before shit completely hit the fan, even though I was already uncomfortable with it. I already had a Mastodon user, but not under my real name.

Then, during the exodus, I created a Mastodon user for academic use. This was a few months before defending my PhD in social sciences.

For a while, I was posting the same content on both platforms. On Twitter I am followed by a lot of people in my field, and many of them are still active. On Mastodon, there’s like… two active people specifically in my field.

Still, whenever I post anything both places, I have gotten more interactions on Mastodon than on Twitter. On Twitter a couple of people see it and boost, and they can be somewhat central in the field. But then it kind of deflates. On Mastodon, I get boosts from the ones there in the field, people in adjacent fields (for example the #rstats crowd), interested people from civil society, commentators, a real variety of people. Hell, the other day I was boosted by a folk singer I’ve been a fan of for years but that I didn’t even know was on there.

Meanwhile, I occasionally check the temperature on Bluesky, and I bridge my posts there. Many in my field signed up while it was invite only. Some of them posted one or two posts back then. I haven’t seen any actively since, and nobody from my field has followed my bridged account - but one R stats person has.

I guess they must be on Twitter still, if they are anywhere.

Anyway, point is, my field indeed failed to migrate. But I still achieve more by posting on Mastodon than on Twitter.

There seems to be another side to this story as well. I’m not quite invested enough to dig into it, but it might not be such an awful loss.

Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It’s shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.

Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.

“There’s no such thing as free lunch” is a stupidity. There is. You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning, and they are often provided ingredients for free from supermarkets that would otherwise end in the trash.

It’s a dumb metaphor that doesn’t even work in the original example. There is more to life than capitalism.

That didn’t mean nobody should pay. I make monthly donations to my Mastodon instance, and will probably branch out soon to support to other services I use as well. But everything is not always about money.