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.
Hey, that’s us!
I thought they were just adding activitypub to some products / making their own accounts but
However, the company is aiming to tackle some of the obstacles that have prevented users from joining and participating in the fediverse so far, including the technical hurdles around onboarding, finding people to follow and discovering interesting content to discuss.
What Mozilla wants to accomplish, then, is to help reconfigure the Mastodon onboarding process so that when someone — including a publisher or creator — joins its instance (or the fediverse in general) they’re able to build their audience with more ease.
Now THAT would be cool. If the browser had a built in way to handle some of this stuff, it would be a lot simpler to deal with some of the issues. I’d love to learn more
It makes a lot of sense to me to just have minimum standards for Fediverse instances, and then anyone who wants to host users can be a default instance for a period of time and just rotate through them Round Robin-style so nobody gets slammed with too many new users at once.
This is literally the bottleneck of all of fediverse imo.
With ease of use integrated into the fediverse, half of social media could become irrelevant.
My brain went “Firefox has what 7% market share? What’s 50% of that?? Actually, that probably is 4x the ‘Fediverse’ user total right there”
4.87% on North American Desktops, 6.16% worldwide, 10.77% in Europe, 17.43% in Germany. Not even showing up on mobile and tablet, here’s the numbers.
World-wide usage of adblock is much higher, 42.7%, so if Google actually goes through with their plan Chrome is going to lose market share, massively.
7%? Are you one of the people arguing for getting the CEO their bonuses or something?
If you only count desktop browsers, then yes. If you count all browsers, they’re below 3% (somewhere between 2.6% and 2.9%). Even on w3schools, a primarily developer oriented website, Firefox is at 4.8% (still down 0.2% from the 5% in January).
Based on market share numbers and their general lack of focus, Mozilla integrating with the Fediverse may very well be a bad omen predicting end of both the Fediverse and Firefox.
I remember the good old days when FF almost hit 30%.
It does make sense. Most of the android users directly use google search bar and dont even bother to open a browser directly if its one shot query or not using multiple tabs.
7 was a stand in for a single digit numbet… didn’t realize it was that low. Yikes
Three percent of all browsers is a fuckton of users, considering that includes mobile users who are going to be less likely to change their browser then desktop users. There is an estimated 6.92 billion smartphone users. Three percent of that is more users than there are people in the United States.
It’s mostly Mastodon. The text doesn’t even mention Lemmy or Kbin.
I’m glad that Mozilla is doing this. It benefits both sides (Mozilla and the Fediverse), in a transparent way. Hopefully we get some Fediverse companion for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey.
I have never understood why so many people find the structure of Twitter/Mastodon more appealing than that of Reddit/Lemmy.
I like it when I read other people’s thoughts on a matter, then react to them by adding relevant thoughts of my own and hoping people will react to mine too. Like on a traditional discussion forum (or for even older people, newsgroup or mailing list). That is what Reddit/Lemmy does reasonably well, although not quite as well as those traditional discussion forums.
On Twitter/Mastodon I have to have original thoughts of my own to be able to post anything at all, and even if I do have some, no one will read them if they aren’t already following me.
I agree with your preference for forum/community style.
But I think the purpose of microblogging is to follow a personality, rather than a topic or community. And users that share there do so to cultivate a following, which would be harder on Reddit/Lemmy (only ones that I can think of who do that successfully are onlyfans users).
Agreed. Micro-blogging, is more top down info downstreaming. While the forum/community focuses on information exchange on a more even keel level.
Yes, I guess so. I have no interest in becoming any kind of celebrity. That sounds stressful and can make you a target for harassment.
I prefer it when I can post my thoughts anonymously without anyone knowing or caring who I am. If a thought is good, it doesn’t matter whose thought it is.
Yeah, Mastodon is much larger than Lemmy yet it feels like shouting into the void. I like it as a means to keep up on news by following journalists who’ve fled twitter but I’ve yet to get any real interaction on my posts. Meanwhile on Lemmy I’m never running out of things to read and people to discuss posts with.
They have to start somewhere. Mastodon is the highest profile app in the fediverse and it’s best to capitalize on Twitter imploding while the dregs are hot.
Don’t worry, Reddit will do something stupid to get in the headlines eventually.
I’m just hoping that Peertube is in a spot to capitalize when Youtube crashes and burns in a couple of years
It’s not. I wish it was, but it’s not.
I meant more as “will be” when the time comes
I’m not hopeful. Video hosting is a different ball game, and free video platforms only exist due to the deep pockets and “users now, profit later” strategy of big tech.
The only way I see it working is where creators pay for the hosting costs of their own content and monetize on their own terms.
So are they going to release non-AGPL (probably MPL) implementations of fediverse software? That would be real progress.
Why would that be progress?
