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.
Mozilla is a small company
I'm surprised that people consider a ~2000-person company that revenues about a half billion a year to be "small". Mozilla is a profit-driven corporation, far separated from the vision of the hobbyist coders who founded it decades ago. The only reason they're shutting down their Mastodon server is because it's not making them money, not because they lack the resources to support it.
They have about 750 employees.
(According to Wikipedia)
Still, 750 is totally not a small company, also they manage and host matrix/element, that are way more edgy in terms of technology, takes a LOT of time only for maintenance if you have bigs rooms :
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix
Choices are not neutrals and I don't know what I would do at their seats, but I think it's a bit sad that mozilla invest more into matrix/element instead political opinion makers like these social network xitter alternatives, fediverse & all <3
Maybe I don't know shit and maybe Mastodon is also a heavy mess to selfhost !
Maybe I should’ve said “midsize.”
My point is that they’re not a company with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. And, as someone that usually likes to work at companies that are about size, you can run out of engineers pretty quickly if you’re not focused and or working on stuff that is wickedly complex. And Mozilla is definitely doing the latter.
i think their matrix server is hosted by element
Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the for-profit) are two different entities under the Mozilla umbrella, so their staffing may be reported differently depending where you look and how they're counting it.
The foundation is about 80 folks on payroll, although OSS projects have about 1000 contributors popping in and out.
There is also the “MZLA Technologies” subsidiary, which I think has some dedicated headcount under it as well. Although, there isn’t a lot of public info about that company.
the “MZLA Technologies” subsidiary
isn't that where ThunderBird is?
This take is silly. Spinning up a mastodon instance would have never made them money at any point. If it was all about money, the instance would never have been made to begin with.
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.
I think official instances should be fairly small, no? They shouldn’t allow users from outside Mozilla onto their instance. The point is that they federate and can interact with a wider audience from an official source.
Yeah, I believe the official instance of EU and ACM are both quite small. It is a great way to verify people's identity just from their ID.
But muh free service!
I'm sad it's gone but I'm not gonna pretend like it's the end of the world.
The hell is with all these comments?
Mozilla is far from perfect but god damn the degree of hatred and mirth some people have is entirely disproportionate to anything they've actually done, and completely irrespective of the good they actually do.
It's got the same energy as leftist purity testing, where there is no "net good", only perfection and villains to be spat on.
It almost seems like there's anti Mozilla campaign going on. It's normal to see some critique but all of a sudden there is a huge Mozilla hate push. Call me crazy but it feels organized
Google really wants to make sure you can't escape their ad-riddled bullshit when they get rid of Manifest v2
There is, I just saw a post trying to demonize Mozilla simply because they had a few job listings for AI and Ad managers and the take away in the post itself was like "I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads", like are you serious??? A few job listings is enough to paint the entire future of the company lol
This was my takeaway also. As if Chromium and all It’s derivatives are just going to not use daddy Alphabet’s ai tech.
I've felt this for a while.
When dirty tricks are at play, it's best to resist.
Don't get me wrong, they've made some bad decisions, but the world is a darker place without them.
The enshittification warning signs are going off everywhere, Mozilla is being corrupted before our very eyes. Now is not the time to hand wave it away.
Unfortunately with Google's antitrust lawsuits, it's quite likely Mozilla will lose the majority of their funding in the near future, since their biggest source of revenue is Google paying them to be default.
Yea, that's not helping keep anything off the enshittification train that's for sure. Desperation is dangerous.
Oh the irony lol
I'm, like, yeah, some of the stuff Mozilla has done has been worrying, but I've seen far worse happen to some other open source projects and their corporate branches.
I'm not worried about Mozilla projects' future. If LibreOffice survived corporate calcification, I see no reason why Mozilla projects wouldn't, if the push comes to a shove. But the thing is, in my opinion, push hasn't come to a shove yet. There's red flags at best, which is a cause for concern, but that's it.
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.
Yes, officer, these two right here.
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.
Yes, but neither do many of the large open source projects that aren’t funded by Google.
Most large scale open source projects at this point are funded by somebody. usually because they have benefit to an enterprise somewhere. But I don’t know if an alternative browser really provides much enterprise support anywhere, sadly.
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.
I don't think google will allow them to move to chromium. They need gecko to avoid anti-trust law suites.
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:
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.
Didn't even know they had one
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
