The writing was on the wall anyway. With the news of the political struggles between Steve Teixeira (who was pushing for deeper integration with open social web) and Laura Chambers (who seems more interested in keeping Google happy to receive the fat checks) it was clear that the whole "Let's open an instance and call an experiment with new social media" was just a way to pretend they were doing anything in the space while not hurting any of Big Tech's feelings.
I have limited experience with Mastodon but all of it has been full of weirdos and far left extremists. I am surprised that any business entity would use it.
Mozilla gave plenty of time for this instance to do something spectacular but perhaps, this experiment never made sense in the first place.
> Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users as of the time of Tuesday’s announcement.
There is just no financial benefit for Mozilla in spinning up a Mastodon instance only to be used by what <300 active users?
> By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users.
That's Threads remember? They are now part of the 'fediverse' and interoperate with Mastodon with over ~180M+ monthly active users which is >150x bigger than the monthly active users of the entire fediverse!
We already have the results after witnessing a live experiment [0] when Brazil banned Twitter / X and with lots of alternatives to sign up to; the majority of Brazilians signed up to either Bluesky or Threads.
Maybe Mozilla looked at an actual migration from X to BlueSky or Threads and realized that there was really no point in running a Mastodon instance when Threads was the biggest one.
Only a subset of Threads users are currently exposed to the Fediverse, and I believe only partially (not sure if replies have been enabled yet, and if they are, if they're visible as regular replies, or under a separate heading?).
I'd also note that social media use differs hugely per country. See, for example, WhatsApp vs iMessage use in the US and outside, or how Brazil used to be big on Orkut. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from Brazilian usage patterns vs the rest of the world.
Threads is not fully open. If they looked at Threads and thought "that's a lot of people", then it would be *one more* reason to have their own instance.
But anyway, I do agree that having their own instance is kind of pointless. We need to get rid of "servers" and get back to an Open Social Web. I wrote in May what I thought would be a smarter approach for them (https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi...). Instead of yet-another mastodon server, they would be better off if they started building something like https://browser.pub inside of Firefox.
The writing was on the wall anyway. With the news of the political struggles between Steve Teixeira (who was pushing for deeper integration with open social web) and Laura Chambers (who seems more interested in keeping Google happy to receive the fat checks) it was clear that the whole "Let's open an instance and call an experiment with new social media" was just a way to pretend they were doing anything in the space while not hurting any of Big Tech's feelings.
Back in May I wrote a series of blog posts about mozilla.social, ActivityPub and what I thought could be done instead. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40428098)
Maybe they realized Mastodon has no real migration from one instance to another, ant that it's been a criticized limitation since 2019.
I have limited experience with Mastodon but all of it has been full of weirdos and far left extremists. I am surprised that any business entity would use it.
Mozilla gave plenty of time for this instance to do something spectacular but perhaps, this experiment never made sense in the first place.
> Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users as of the time of Tuesday’s announcement.
There is just no financial benefit for Mozilla in spinning up a Mastodon instance only to be used by what <300 active users?
> By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users.
That's Threads remember? They are now part of the 'fediverse' and interoperate with Mastodon with over ~180M+ monthly active users which is >150x bigger than the monthly active users of the entire fediverse!
We already have the results after witnessing a live experiment [0] when Brazil banned Twitter / X and with lots of alternatives to sign up to; the majority of Brazilians signed up to either Bluesky or Threads.
Maybe Mozilla looked at an actual migration from X to BlueSky or Threads and realized that there was really no point in running a Mastodon instance when Threads was the biggest one.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408985
Only a subset of Threads users are currently exposed to the Fediverse, and I believe only partially (not sure if replies have been enabled yet, and if they are, if they're visible as regular replies, or under a separate heading?).
I'd also note that social media use differs hugely per country. See, for example, WhatsApp vs iMessage use in the US and outside, or how Brazil used to be big on Orkut. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from Brazilian usage patterns vs the rest of the world.
Threads is not fully open. If they looked at Threads and thought "that's a lot of people", then it would be *one more* reason to have their own instance.
But anyway, I do agree that having their own instance is kind of pointless. We need to get rid of "servers" and get back to an Open Social Web. I wrote in May what I thought would be a smarter approach for them (https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi...). Instead of yet-another mastodon server, they would be better off if they started building something like https://browser.pub inside of Firefox.
> There is just no financial benefit for Mozilla in spinning up a Mastodon instance only to be used by what <300 active users?
Was the instance every actually open to the public? Seems to have been invite-only for the entire duration.