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
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.
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.
If they switch to Chromium they lose their half a billion per year from Google to be the token “look we’re not a monopoly here’s competition” browser.
Cowards. Mozilla has forgotten its roots at its own peril.
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
Not surprised, Mozilla the company has been shit for years and getting worse.
I called it months ago with the whole Russia fiasco and then reiterated with the whole ad company buy out fiasco. Downvoted both times.
Mozilla is on a path of enshittification and from what I see the “safeguards” that were put in place to prevent enshittification of FF are eroding
Didn’t even know they had one
