this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 149 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 115 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mozilla is so small it only pays its CEO 10 million a year.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 month ago (2 children)

How do they even afford to eat???

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Probably the $500 million or so that Google pays them every year

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

They probably shop at Aldi.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

They have about 750 employees.

(According to Wikipedia)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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 !

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

The ethos of Mozilla

That's the thing that changed.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

But muh free service!

I'm sad it's gone but I'm not gonna pretend like it's the end of the world.

[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago

Google really wants to make sure you can't escape their ad-riddled bullshit when they get rid of Manifest v2

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

This was my takeaway also. As if Chromium and all It’s derivatives are just going to not use daddy Alphabet’s ai tech.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 month ago

It's absolutely bonkers.

There's so many people here that fight against their own interests by letting perfect be the enemy of good.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yea, that's not helping keep anything off the enshittification train that's for sure. Desperation is dangerous.

Oh the irony lol

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago

Technically I think that's still "put us first on the search bar" money. You're giving the real under-the-table explanation.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes, but neither do many of the large open source projects that aren’t funded by Google.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I just want something rust based

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Have you tried putting your cast iron in the dishwasher?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Don't bother. Just leave it on the sink with some water.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Yes, officer, these two right here.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

I really hope servo takes off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I don't think google will allow them to move to chromium. They need gecko to avoid anti-trust law suites.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

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??

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago

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:

  • Firefox OS - honestly great. I still have my Firefox OS phone sitting around in a box somewhere.
  • Mozilla Persona - an authentication service, was great and still better than the existing alternatives

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.

[–] altima_neo 20 points 1 month ago

Didn't even know they had one

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Cowards. Mozilla has forgotten its roots at its own peril.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

270 active users for a mastodon instance

Nobody used the damn thing, but shuttering it makes them cowards? k

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