[HN Gopher] Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social net...
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Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future
Author : cpeterso
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-11-03 20:39 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| troupe wrote:
| Just statistically speaking, based on past performance, would you
| be better off betting with or against Mozilla?
| mouse_ wrote:
| It pains me greatly, but I would bet against them eleven out of
| ten times.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| I would bet on Mozilla doing anything that doesn't involve
| fixing bugs in Firefox.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| > _For example, Mozilla is currently experimenting with a
| Discover feed that aims to surface engaging content. Over time,
| it plans to gather more signals from around the fediverse to
| determine what sort of content people are interacting with._
|
| Until this is integrated into Mastodon by default - or any other
| new social network - its success will be limited to a niche at
| best. The only reason Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest
| have been able to retain users is because of the algorithms which
| surface engaging content that keeps users coming back for more.
| (Sadly for society, the most "engaging" is usually the most
| polemic or inflammatory possible, which bad actors have abused
| successfully with tragic results for all of us.)
|
| Let me back up this statement with simple math:
|
| If you follow 100 accounts (not a crazy amount) and they post an
| average of 5 times a day (some more, some less), that's 500 posts
| a day to process. Assuming 16 waking hours a day, that's a tweet
| every 2 minutes. The more people you follow, the crazier the
| numbers get.
|
| Over a decade ago when I still used Twitter and its API still
| functioned, I pulled my personal feed into a custom database, and
| then added my own web UI on top of it so I could try different
| ways of seeing all the posts from accounts I followed. I tried
| grouping by user, time, topic, custom ordering, filtering,
| formatting, etc. It turns out, it was impossible. No matter what
| I tried, the sheer quantity of posts means I'd miss a majority of
| them. At the time, I foolishly thought that this meant social
| media was just a fad that would soon go away - I didn't foresee
| the effect the discovery algorithms would have on their usage.
|
| Mastodon doesn't have this functionality by default and because
| of the federated nature of the service, probably won't any time
| soon. So people join Mastodon, use it for a while before they
| reach a tipping point, get overwhelmed by toots, don't feel
| they're getting any decent response for their own posts, don't
| see anything instantly engaging at the top of their feed, and
| then slowly stop using it.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| Digging their own grave.
| treyd wrote:
| Care to elaborate what you mean by this? There's a lot of valid
| criticism of Mozilla in 2023 but what this article is talking
| about doesn't seem like it on the surface.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| Look at their website, it's just a twitter clone.
|
| How will Mozilla compete with Meta, Twitter?
|
| https://mozilla.social/public/local
|
| Content is complete garbage.
|
| Decentralisation isn't a feature for 99.9% of people.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's just a mastodon instance, not something new - part of
| the fediverse.
| notabee wrote:
| We're already entombed under deep layers of enshittification
| caused by excessive centralization. So if they're digging a
| grave it's just to meet us where we're at.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Firefox deserves better.
| jmugan wrote:
| I remember in 2011 looking into decentralized social networks. I
| didn't see the point since existing ones worked fine. Time has
| proven me wrong. The existing ones now don't let me control my
| feed, and they keep throwing unwanted notifications at me that I
| can't turn off.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Internet Identity Workshop - Berkman Center + Berkeley 2005 :-(
| mjr00 wrote:
| This is going to be another Mozilla failure.
|
| The era of big, public social media has peaked. People know
| better now: Big Brother is always watching, and what you post
| _will_ be linked back to your real identity, maybe 10 years from
| now, whether you like it or not. What you post on Facebook,
| Twitter /X, Reddit, Instagram, even HN, is no longer your real,
| authentic self, it's an idealized self that you're marketing to
| someone. Decentralized/federated or centralized is irrelevant; if
| it's publicly accessible, it's all the same.
|
| Social media has shifted to the world of smaller communities that
| can't be discovered (or at least are _much_ harder to discover)
| by the outside world. The younger generation are using Roblox and
| Fortnite as places to hang out and meet new people. The slightly
| less young generation has moved to Discord. I 'm in Discord
| servers of a variety of topics (games, music, TV, programming...)
| and it's a _world_ of difference how people act when they 're
| neither trying to ragebait to harvest likes and retweets nor
| stepping on eggshells to avoid ruining their job prospects
| because an employer Googled their name.
|
| The internet is just too damn big now. We aren't in a world where
| there's space on the internet for people to give updates when the
| poop comes out anymore.[0] Making another social media site whose
| target audience is "the internet", both in terms of viewers and
| writers, is a fool's errand.
|
| [0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre
| reidjs wrote:
| Aren't discord and Roblox communities part of a decentralized
| social network???
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Discord is completely centralized. What they call servers
| aren't.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I am 100% behind people-driven, federated social media. But their
| argument is a bit strange.
|
| Because when you truly let the people decide what is politically
| correct to say online, we have already seen that bubbles are
| formed and borders are drawn. I don't know how many different
| fediverses there are out there, someone should do a project and
| try to map them.
|
| But I can tell which bubble Mozilla wants to be in.
|
| The best way to navigate the fediverse, as an instance operator,
| is to be completely apolitical. Even then people will hate you
| for not taking a stance, but I think you'll get away with a
| minimal amount of polarization.
| coldtea wrote:
| Which of Mozilla's "bets" ever remotely panned put?
|
| The only thing they got going for them, wasn't even an official
| bet by Mozilla, they were making the crappy bloated broswer +
| suite, and some community members created Firefox (then Phoenix).
|
| They should focus 100% on regaining browser market share and
| innovating on the browser space, instead of the numerous
| diversions. Of course as long as the C-team is paid handsomnly
| while driving Firefox to the ground, and Google pays them, they
| won't care.
| tqi wrote:
| "We want people to have choice and agency"
|
| I think this fundamentally misdiagnoses the root of the issue,
| post 2016-election. People have plenty control over what content
| they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc), and
| existing social media companies are exceptionally good at
| figuring out how to show them more of the content they want. The
| problem is when it shows users content that they want but others
| don't want them to see, and in our current political environment
| there is no consensus on where the line is between being a
| responsible steward and censorship.
|
| Put it a different way, if Truth Social had taken off users would
| have had "more choice" of social networks. Would the Mozilla
| leadership have considered that a good outcome?
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(page generated 2023-11-03 23:00 UTC)