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...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7456748

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.

  • Wooster@startrek.websiteEnglish
    19·
    2 years ago

    I just read the entire article and I don’t see why Mozilla really wants in on the Fediverse. It covers a lot of how it wants in, but not the driving motivation.

    My best guess is they want to be the next Facebook/Twitter. They see a window and think it’s not something to miss.

    Never forget: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”, even if it’s from a relatively liked company like Mozilla.

    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
      8·
      2 years ago

      At least as Mozilla exists now, I think it would be much harder for it to become “enshitified”.

      Preface: IANAL, just going off my best understanding.

      The Mozilla Corporation is actually wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit. Profits that the corporation generates are the property of the Foundation, which falls under all the usual restrictions for spending and reporting that 501.c.3 orgs have. So at least as they exist now, Mozilla’s profits cannot be used to enrich executives or investors, which is the driving motivation behind the enshitification cycle.

  • sqgl@beehaw.org
    11·
    2 years ago

    The fediverse sounds just like what we all thought the internet was back in the early 90’s.

    Apart from Mozilla sabotaging the ideal in ways others describe here I can think of other ways it could be hijacked by corporate interests…

    eg elimination of net neutrality so that ISP’s prioritise traffic to paying servers, then doing deals with the biggest servers until we again only have a handful of options if we want wide reach?

    Humans are suckers for hype and corporations know hype. While that is dangerous for democracy I have lost interest in communicating with the masses so being part of a relatively small network of people is just fine by me.