MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has
MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has
But they did stick with it, AFAIK? They just took down their mastodon instance, that’s absolutely not the same thing. Unless you mean to imply that all of us here, using this but not running our own instance, are also “not sticking it up for the Fediverse” or so.
Plus, let’s not forget that by their underlying nature, Reddit and Twitter are not ad-driven via the ads shown directly. The real ads are in astroturfing, promotions and subtle pushing of products and ideas. And Lemmy, Mastodon, et al are just as susceptible to that, if not more so, lacking a usable central authority to curb such behavior if wanted.
It wasn’t meant to be just an ordinary mastodon instance they were running. Nobody seems to be saying exactly what was being worked on, but judging by what was said in the various press releases and so on they were trying to reinvent social media. It sounded like some kind of giant ambitious project that failed. Perhaps a bit too ambitious, then. If it continues in some other form I’m unaware of it.
But outside of whatever that was, they haven’t done even what one would think of as the bare minimum when it comes to federated social media. The CEO never had even a mastodon account, so far as we know. I would check once in a while to see if that had changed, before eventually giving up. Their home page still invites us to “follow @mozilla” at exclusively at the usual places such as twitter and instragram.
Their hamfisted attempts to appear to be actively on the side of addressing the problems of contemporary social media were not well-received, their mastodon fork must’ve got mismanaged into some kind of impenetrable morass, so they walked away from the whole thing and are on to the next brilliant idea.