[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Mozilla is exiting the fediverse. Though the concept of the open social web, also known as the fediverse, has been picking up momentum ever since Meta last year introduced its first-ever federated app, Instagram Threads, Firefox maker Mozilla on Tuesday announced it would be ending its experiment in running a server on the fediverse. The server, Mozilla.social, today connects users with the Mastodon social network, an open source rival to Twitter/X. It will be shut down on December 17."

I wish Mozilla had taken a more ambitious approach to the fediverse, rather than running a Mastodon instance for a handful of people. An organization of its size could have prototyped different kinds of social media on the fediverse, or incubated disparate projects running on the protocol. It could even have experimented with adding social functionality directly to Firefox. Instead, precisely none of that happened, and its instance was apparently used by 270 people or so.

Sarah Perez points out that this isn't the only initiative that's been shuttered recently:

"Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down."

Mozilla itself has a lot of potential but never seems to quite realize it: it doesn't seem to be very good at building a joined-up product strategy, which has led its existence to become increasingly at risk. The vast majority of its funding (nearly 90%) has come from Google's payments to the organization in exchange for being the default search engine pick - and now that's under threat.

There's a need for a mission-driven organization with Mozilla's values that executes more fearlessly, where product voices hold more weight vs open source engineering discussions. But, right now, I don't think it exists.

#Fediverse

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