Mozilla (@mozilla@mozilla.social)
mozilla.social
We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024. Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta. You can continue to use Mozilla.social until December 17. Before that date, you can download your data here (https://mozilla.social/settings/export), and migrate your account to another instance following these instructions (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozilla-social-faq).

idk I was thinking federated social media was pretty peachy at the start of the year but with the total failure of the mastodon project to implement basic trust & safety features to keep black people from facing torrents of racism on there it might be cooked

  • jacab [he/him]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I agree, the whole paradigm of activitypub instances being treated as little local web communities that can interact with one another from their respective websites in limited ways is very flawed if the goal is for it to catch on as an alternative to existing social media experiences.

    Although that's not to say that paradigm is innately bad though, since it works fine for more tech-savvy people and is basically what hexbear has and works well with, but it's a total non-starter for the average social media user.

    Personally I think that something along the lines of what you said is the only way activitypub will ever be able to exit the niche space it currently occupies. The user should not have to learn how it works whatsoever. Ideally the process of getting a friend to join should sound more like "Install this app or go to this website(which is a server-agnostic frontend), click register and pick a service provider(not an 'instance')" rather than "Find an instance, go to its website(which all look slightly different), create an account, and then inevitably end up with a disjointed mess of browser tabs on different instances because you clicked 'View the full profile on the original instance' while trying to find people to follow."

    I'm not a developer, but it really feels like the fediverse movement is sort of trying to reinvent the wheel in a lot of ways. Also sorry for the long rambling reply, I'm bored at work.

    • quarrk [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      I’m of two minds. On one hand I agree, it’s gotta be dead simple. On the other hand I think the public is more capable than it seems. People figured out email and the mess that is Windows. The fediverse just feels like a lot because it’s new. Some better branding is in order though, like your example of not using the word “instance”.

      I often think it would be better to obfuscate the federation aspect altogether. Most users don’t need to know or care that a post or user came from another instance. But I think that path will ultimately be more confusing than just having the small learning curve.