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. Befo...
Lemmy support would be much more fitting for Mozilla. They could add plugin or lemmy integration to their browser that could show discussions from subscribed communities matching the current url.
Effectively acting as a "comment section" but for any page. One would only need lemmy account to comment on youtube videos, news articles, blogs etc.
Lemmy has less than half a million total users, and YTD MAU peaked at 52k.
Even putting aside technical details, I fail to see how "Lemmy integration in the browser" could be a good product strategy. A plugin/extension can also be developed by independent developers, which seems much more fitting for the size of the target demographic. Maybe I'm missing something.
Well since they were/are hosting Mastodon instance they do seem to have some interest in the fediverse. They do also have official plugins.
Personally I feel something like this could be the next step for social link aggregation and discussion platforms. Being able to share and discuss on about videos and articles without having to register to dozens or more pages while also having some control over the people you interract with through instances, subscribed communities etc.
Source media would also be unable to control what can or cannot be discussed. Many youtube videos and news articles for example may block all comments. It would be up to community on how to moderate discussion.
Gab tried to pull the same thing with their Dissenter plugin. It was such a bad idea that Mozilla and Google banded together to remove the extensions from their stores for ToS violations.
Now imagine what a nightmare it would be to moderate the ability to comment on anything online with actual standards and decency.
Good. Stop fucking around, focus on the browser. If they can make it provide value that Google can't, they are succeeding. Google cant compete in privacy.
It's an opt-in feature that just opens whatever AI service you picked, their website in a sidebar. You can even use your own local AI if you want to. Or not use it at all. But the AI isn't actually in your browser any more than it is in your browser when you open their website in a tab.
If the translation thing counts as AI then that's actually a really cool and more private use of it compared to querying a server. It can do the translation completely locally. Works pretty well too in my experience, though it does think for a moment when you tell it to translate.
Exactly. They should be dropping anything that isn't revenue positive or isn't furthering the goals of browser. Rust is a great project because it's being used directly in the browser. Mastodon isn't, because it has no relationship to their browser efforts. I'm on the fence about the VPN, but if it's revenue positive, it should probably stick around, and it sort of benefits the browser as well.
The majority of those are nothing burgers. They shut down their dedicated password app when they integrated its features into the browser, they shut down their encrypted file sharing tool when they realized it was being used for very nefarious uses, they shut down Positron and it's affiliated projects because nobody started using it over Electron... and a lot of the rest are extremely niche (like viewing websites in 3d, cool but not all that useful).
Yes, I think that's natural. A large segment of their market is still there. Throwing away years of work when the accounts cost relatively little to maintain would be wasteful. I don't see how their presence there is relevant to this discussion.
Do they at least have an account on someone else's instance then? If they do, it's fine for them to not have to spend resources on maintaining their own.
It seems like there is no user named "Mozilla" on the lemmy.world instance. However, Mozilla does have a variety of other projects and services apart from Firefox and Thunderbird, such as:
Mozilla Matrix: Mozilla operates an instance of the Matrix chat protocol. You can join and communicate on their Matrix channels.
Mozilla VPN: A virtual private network service.
Pocket: An application for managing a reading list of articles from the web.
Common Voice: A project to help make voice recognition open and accessible to everyone.
MDN Web Docs: Documentation for web technologies, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
After Mozilla introduced "Allow web sites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement", I was out for good now. I moved to forks like Floorp, LibreWolf or Waterfox.
I'm assuming because they don't have those AI engineers. I don't agree with this or AI, but diversification isn't something that can be ignored.
They need to focus on browser and bet on things that could succeed in the future. Winding down those bets that failed (like 3d visual worlds) is sensible.
Of the 60 they are laying off, how many of those work on Firefox?
And locally-run translation that utilises AI, as well as AI accessibility features for blind users isn't nefarious. I mean, unless you dislike private translations and would rather send that data to Google, or hate blind people, but I'd hope you don't.
People need to actually look into features before they have a stupid and completely reactionary "it says AI therefore evil" response. People who react that way are morons.