Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future | TechCrunch
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Consumers are hungry for a new way of social networking, where trust and safety are paramount and power isn't centralized with a Big Tech CEO in charge...

The mission-driven tech company behind the Firefox browser, Pocket reader and other apps is now investing its energy into the so-called “fediverse” — a collection of decentralized social networking applications, like Mastodon, that communicate with one another over the ActivityPub protocol.

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
    2·
    11 months ago

    It’s mostly Mastodon. The text doesn’t even mention Lemmy or Kbin.

    I’m glad that Mozilla is doing this. It benefits both sides (Mozilla and the Fediverse), in a transparent way. Hopefully we get some Fediverse companion for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      They have to start somewhere. Mastodon is the highest profile app in the fediverse and it’s best to capitalize on Twitter imploding while the dregs are hot.

      Don’t worry, Reddit will do something stupid to get in the headlines eventually.

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      11 months ago

      I have never understood why so many people find the structure of Twitter/Mastodon more appealing than that of Reddit/Lemmy.

      I like it when I read other people’s thoughts on a matter, then react to them by adding relevant thoughts of my own and hoping people will react to mine too. Like on a traditional discussion forum (or for even older people, newsgroup or mailing list). That is what Reddit/Lemmy does reasonably well, although not quite as well as those traditional discussion forums.

      On Twitter/Mastodon I have to have original thoughts of my own to be able to post anything at all, and even if I do have some, no one will read them if they aren’t already following me.

      • Uninvited Guest@lemmy.ca
        1·
        11 months ago

        I agree with your preference for forum/community style.

        But I think the purpose of microblogging is to follow a personality, rather than a topic or community. And users that share there do so to cultivate a following, which would be harder on Reddit/Lemmy (only ones that I can think of who do that successfully are onlyfans users).

      • ZeroCool@feddit.chEnglish
        01·
        11 months ago

        Yeah, Mastodon is much larger than Lemmy yet it feels like shouting into the void. I like it as a means to keep up on news by following journalists who’ve fled twitter but I’ve yet to get any real interaction on my posts. Meanwhile on Lemmy I’m never running out of things to read and people to discuss posts with.

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I thought they were just adding activitypub to some products / making their own accounts but

      However, the company is aiming to tackle some of the obstacles that have prevented users from joining and participating in the fediverse so far, including the technical hurdles around onboarding, finding people to follow and discovering interesting content to discuss.

      What Mozilla wants to accomplish, then, is to help reconfigure the Mastodon onboarding process so that when someone — including a publisher or creator — joins its instance (or the fediverse in general) they’re able to build their audience with more ease.

      Now THAT would be cool. If the browser had a built in way to handle some of this stuff, it would be a lot simpler to deal with some of the issues. I’d love to learn more

      • hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        11 months ago

        This is literally the bottleneck of all of fediverse imo.

        With ease of use integrated into the fediverse, half of social media could become irrelevant.

        • intelati@programming.dev
          0·
          11 months ago

          My brain went “Firefox has what 7% market share? What’s 50% of that?? Actually, that probably is 4x the ‘Fediverse’ user total right there”

            • antrosapien@lemmy.ml
              1·
              11 months ago

              It does make sense. Most of the android users directly use google search bar and dont even bother to open a browser directly if its one shot query or not using multiple tabs.

              • AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                1·
                11 months ago

                Three percent of all browsers is a fuckton of users, considering that includes mobile users who are going to be less likely to change their browser then desktop users. There is an estimated 6.92 billion smartphone users. Three percent of that is more users than there are people in the United States.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            1·
            11 months ago

            4.87% on North American Desktops, 6.16% worldwide, 10.77% in Europe, 17.43% in Germany. Not even showing up on mobile and tablet, here’s the numbers.

            World-wide usage of adblock is much higher, 42.7%, so if Google actually goes through with their plan Chrome is going to lose market share, massively.