Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon

Maintaining a web browser is an intensely cost and time prohibitive endeavor, especially nowadays. The FOSS community can maintain a lot of things but the sheer scale of Firefox, the need for expertise, the necessary labor, it just can't be done by volunteers and donations, at least not without using Chromium. They have to get a cash infusion from somewhere.

I don't like it anymore than you do but ultimately the issue isn't Mozilla, it's the state of the technology market. Silicon Valley is no place for a non-profit organization right now, no matter how much we need it.

What we need is regulations and anti-trust, but even that may not truly save us.

They need money. That's it. That's the long and short of it.

I hope they hit on something stand-out soon. To establish more sustainability. Seems like everything is in change right now.

What should they be doing instead? Begging for donations? I do agree in general, tho. Seems they should at least be squirreling away some (or most) of that money into a foundation, because they're obviously going to need it one day.

Would be great if they did not get money from google. They could set.up a donations program or something and regularly ask for it like Wikipedia. Donation based browser, peoples Browser.

I feel like this relationship of: one company pays a competitor to promote an unrelated product that could very reasonably be used to engage in anti-competitive behavior should at the very least be heavily regulated by the SEC, or possibly just outright prohibited. Alphabet is the epitome of the mega-corporation who has the resources to compete viciously in almost any industry, but has the breadth for plausible deniability about who their competition is.

"What? Mozilla isn't competition...browser? Oh you mean chrome? That little thing? Nah, we just do that on the side. We're an ad company."

Meanwhile: "What? Meta? You mean like Facebook? We don't compete with them, hah, remember Google+? They compete with TikTok...Oh ads? I guess so, but that's kind of a side thing. We do mobile os/web analytics/email/whatever."

Yeah revenue generator... They want a full name to get on the wait list, no reason for that except marketing.

Where do you get that from? I have no love for tankies, but from what I've seen, they've built a product that's free of their biases, opensourced it and thrown it over the wall with no strings attached.

If you want to make a rooten-tooten white supremacist nazi instance with Lemmy, you can do exactly that. Nobody has to federate with you, and you don't have to federate with them.

Strange take.

The solution for capitalism-out-of-control is not more capitalism. The less big money players in the fediverse the better.

It's open source, anyone can fork the repo any time they want. The original devs won't like it but also there is bugger all they can do about it. It's just that it would be a full time job to take on and no one has the time.

lemmy and reddit are too niche. mozilla getting into mastodon or friendica is far better

Specifically, the model should be the Wikimedia Foundation. That is, a non-profit organization with lots of stakeholders and slow procedures to guarantee accountability, and lots of resources to guarantee it won't go away. This is the pragmatic least-bad solution to the problem of centralization on the internet.

Yeah I've considered leaving Lemmy because of who is in charge of development right now. They were not ready for its sudden burst in popularity and are not handling it well.

What do you mean? I haven't followed the development directly, I've just been a user and so far things seem to be going pretty well. Curious what shortsightedness you are talking about?

I think Mozilla has poor judgment and bad leadership. I don't mind if they participate but they shouldn't be in charge

not really social media is basically booming right now with the implosion of twitter

Better Nate than lever.