Micah LeeDec 21, 2022
Oh hell yeah. @mozilla is launching a Mastodon instance in early 2023! I’m very excited for this. Mozilla is really good at what they do. Firefox has over 200M monthly active users, and with any luck they’ll build better support for the fediverse into Firefox itself. Mastodon will greatly benefit from easy to use professionally run instances that can handle massive scaling https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launch-fediverse-instance-social-media-alternative/
Mozilla to explore healthy social media alternative | The Mozilla Blog

Update: Starting May 4, 2023, we’re expanding Mozilla.social to a private beta. If you’re interested, join our waitlist. In early 2023, Mozilla will st

Show threadOlavDec 21, 2022

@micahflee @mozilla it'll be a Federated instance but not necessarily (probably not) Mastodon. It's important to maintain that distinction

But yes, accessibility to a Federated instance for the average web denizen will be a huge things

Show threadroDec 21, 2022

@olavf @micahflee @mozilla sounds like they explicitly chose mastodon to start with, what makes you think otherwise?

"While we’re starting this exploration on Mastodon — as a mature, stable project, it’s an ideal first step into the Fediverse <...>"

Show threadOlavDec 21, 2022

@ro @ro <...> we believe the potential of the Fediverse is bigger and broader than Mastodon alone.

Anyway that just likely means they're going to fork the Mastodon code base, at which point it's no longer Mastodon. This is common practice for open-source.

FWIW counter/social and truth/social are also Mastodon forks, they're just not Federated.

Show threadro

@olavf i doubt mozilla would maintain a mastodon fork. there's no reason to add more fragmentation to an already not-so-healthy network. if they make some useful changes, why not upstream them?

that said, modern day mozilla does make a lot of weird decisions, so we'll see

Dec 21, 2022 at 6:55pmWeb
Show threadOlavDec 21, 2022

@ro the only fragmentation is there a handful of protocols and some software stacks generally don't support the other protocols. But, if you combine all the other protocols together, ActivityPub has more users by over an order of magnitude.

Different s/w stacks that can talk to each other is a feature, not a bug. In fact, it's the entire point. Forking to add features outside the Mastodon base is one way to do that while maintaining most of the core code

Show threadroDec 21, 2022

@olavf few softwares actually support activitypub. a lot of them just support each other, with explicit compatibility hacks and workarounds. for example, see this method: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/ddbe906c25fc370c92fa557d3637d50b7af97754/app/helpers/jsonld_helper.rb#L134.

the more softwares there are, the more workarounds for each other's incompatibilities they have to add, the worse code quality becomes. even with compliant activitypub, you can have extensions others don't support, and that makes it hard to communicate. emoji reactions, mfm, longform articles, etc.

mastodon/jsonld_helper.rb at ddbe906c25fc370c92fa557d3637d50b7af97754 · mastodon/mastodon

Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community - mastodon/jsonld_helper.rb at ddbe906c25fc370c92fa557d3637d50b7af97754 · mastodon/mastodon

GitHub
Show threadOlavDec 21, 2022

@ro workarounds aside, the entire point, and philosophy,, of the Federation is you can design your thing and talk to other peoples' things. That Mastodon is currently the largest number of instances doesn't mean that Eugen Rochko (the owner of Mastodon) should control everyone's social media

Besides, when Tumblr Federates that's 16M people, tripling the size of the Federation. *If* Flickr federates, that's another 110M people. If we're gonna standardize based on users, Mastodon will lose