I wonder if I could join the fediverse with my own mastodon (Or diaspora or whatever) on my own domain, just like a personal email server. Or would that be much more complicated? Never looked into it but if I do I I'd like to be totally self-managed.
Plenty of people do exactly this. I think one side effect is you wouldn't be as discoverable, if you cared about that. No less than just hosting a blog site of your own, but even that has SEO possibilities.
For sure you can, and also you really should if you are able to. If you are going to use the server by yourself only, you may also consider going with something easier on resources like GoToSocial instead of the fully-fledged Mastodon server.
I just setup a mastodon instance on a vps with my own domain. It was a fun evening project, I just followed mastodon's documentation along with a few supplemental searches. I'd say initial setup is pretty simple, tbd on upkeep ;)
I just wish you could have you own domain while not hosting an instance, like just pointing your DNS records at an email server hosted by somebody else.
The way I read it it's more like wanting to be able to present as user@mycustomdomain.com without having to have your own instance and retaining the ability to move between providers. Sorta like pointing your domain at Google Workplace for a few bucks a month.
Absolutely doable and it's a fun exercise. Mastodon is probably overkill for a single-user instance, there are other ActivityPub services that do not need Postgres+Redis+Ruby etc (pleroma, microblog...).
ps: as I found out while setting up my own server, diaspora is its own thing, it can't federate with ActivityPub services.
Oh I thought diaspora was part of fediverse. It's listed on https://fediverse.party so I assumed it could do ActivityPub. Guessed wrong, thanks for correcting me!
What makes social media unhealthy is a the fact the whole thing is a giant marketing exercise. Every company and every individual has their own brands to maintain. Even sites like Reddit have a brand and image to maintain.. with the right memes (whether political talking points or dank images).
Decentralizing has nothing at all to do with these core issues.
I wonder if a large part of what makes social media unhealthy is exposing human nature to mass communication.
I hate Facebook and Twitter as much as the next person, but maybe humans haven't evolved to be able to instantly reach an audience of thousands or millions without any personal or social risk. People have been dangerous and inhuman for many years in the past on a grand scale, but now every human can exist on a grand scale, and maybe the results of that alone are often unsavory.
One direction we could go in to deepen this conversation is to bring in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction. It potentially explains some of why mass social media communication is so problematic.
> I wonder if a large part of what makes social media unhealthy is exposing human nature to mass communication.
Bingo. I do not believe for a moment that social media company A or B is worsening society. Heck, Facebook links your presumably real identity to your content and people are still disgusting online.
No company will win by not rewarding “interesting content”. We tried that, it was called forums, and they lost out to more “rewarding” communities.
I don't know the book of which you speak, but promoting your work as an individual or even an independent business is different from, for example a company like Doritos advertising their chips. I think the difference is apparent but I'm happy to elaborate if it isn't.
Ok so we can go one step further, which is that most speech is a giant marketing exercise. Some people use it to great effect, others less so. And the ones that do get a multiplier effect from putting that speech on the internet/social media, so the increased reach.
I don't think communities having brands is marketing. That's just community groups: communities have in-jokes, memes, vulnerability, sharing, cultures. HN links to that one dropbox comment. That isn't dropbox marketing or whatever that's just a self-effacing ingroup joke, only tangentially about the company.
Marketing might hijack these groups to sell things, but I don't think just the act of memeing to be marketing or selling anything.
Most start off as a pretty positive experience, which is what makes them so popular! But once they've got that network effect going, people become disinclined to leave, even as the platforms try to monetize and in the process turn into finely-tuned human manipulation platforms.
If a platform like WT Social could gain traction it might work as a sustainable alternative because it lacks that desperate drive to squeeze cash out of people's brains. Currently I'm really enjoying BeReal, but I know it's a matter of time until their fun and playful mechanics turn dark.
> What makes social media unhealthy is a the fact the whole thing is a giant marketing exercise.
No. That's not the problem.
Remove all ads from Twitter or Facebook, bestow a quadrillion-dollar endowment on them, and they'll still turn into shitty, toxic cesspits, because of the way the algorithms bring different people together... In a way that tends to maximize anger.
Now, it's true that 'maximizing engagement' was the reason that those algorithms were built the way they were, but that's only tangential to chasing ad revenue. As long as there's work being done on growing the network, regardless of the reason, the temptation to build it out in that toxic manner will be present.
The paid ads on Twitter and Facebook are hardly the only marketing efforts you see on those sites. In fact I’d say most of the marketing we’re exposed to on Twitter and Facebook isn’t via “ads”.
100% agreed. Toxicity of social media comes from the "look at me!" and "I'm implicitly better than you" mentality. Most people have egos, which is fine and necessary, but social media gives free reign to let those with huge egos use their looks or material goods for attention seeking and any criticism is blocked or met with "haters gonna hate.
Seems like Mozilla is just hopping onto the decentralization/Mastodon bandwagon; where was Mozilla when Mastodon was a fledging new company?
While attention-seeking and "influencers" are problematic, I agree, when I look at how toxic political discussions have become, particularly in America, I don't see attention-seeking as the problem here. Instead, it's a clash of ideologies, compounded by people's ideologies becoming warped by exposure to others (people becoming "radicalized").
I think it's a mix of both clash of ideologies, and attempts to outdoor the other with snarky responses. Throughout history political ideology has had strong opinions from opposing sides, but typical only a subset of people were given an opportunity to voice them. Now, anyone can and a lot of it does seem to be pure snark.
Yes. It's why there's so many people who wanted to quit Twitter recently, but couldn't. They went and tried Mastodon/Hive/etc, but couldn't adjust to having less followers out of the gate. Their brand exists on places like Twitter. In some cases they need it to make money. But even for users with smaller followings, it's where their largest engagements are. And too many people don't want to give that up and start over. The venue for their current brand has to seize to exist before they'll move.
Funny that you mention engagement. I've been witnessing many people in the fedi who say they have much less followers now but the engagement has been so much better than in Twitter since many years.
And the comments have been good and constructive...
Similar to how a post here on HN can have five comments, and the same post on Reddit five hundred. Four hundred trying to make funny quips, ninety trolling, and the rest hidden in the noise. Yet on HN at least three offer real insights, ask good questions etc.
Threads and conversations on the fediverse, currently, are just so much more engaging, positive, insigtfull than on Twitter, it's bonkers. But also in sheer numbers. The same post on twitter gets far less engagement than on fediverse: measured entirely unscientific, but visible nonetheless.
Whatever social media’s problems have been, they absolutely have not included making political opinions unavailable — there is no platform on which every political identity hasn’t been represented.
> they absolutely have not included making political opinions unavailable
This is quite an odd take... especially given one of the largest social media companies was recently bought in part because of overtly unbalanced political censorship on the platform.
Are there various political ideas on all social platforms? Sure... I guess if you look hard enough. You won't find everyone equally stifled in reach, however, which is the problem.
I don't know what point you are trying to make by simply posting links. Whatever it is, these links don't support your argument - that we can be certain of.
Imagine complaining about people posting links as a response on the internet.
If carefully taking in their contents is an inconvenience for you, I’ll spell it out: the general narrative you’re invoking about twitter was always paired with specific pretense that it was conservative views that were somehow being unfairly squashed in discourse on twitter. To the surprise of no one who actually observed discourse on twitter (or understands certain frequent flaws in conservative psychology) it actually turns out that’s not true; they were plenty well represented and even arguably overamplified.
Does this mean progressives were oppressed on twitter? You tell me — if you want to tell the story that even progressive representation is the real problem to be solved on social media, be my guest. But it ain’t gonna stop it from being obvious that the story of twitter’s purchase as a virtuous crusade to bring balance to discourse where conservatives just couldn’t get fair treatment doesn’t hold water — in addition, of course, to the ways the ensuing circus has made it clear that balance not the new owner’s motivation.
It wasn't Mozilla who financially contributed to "California’s infamous anti-gay referendum". Actions can cause consequences, even if it sometimes takes time. I appreciate that he's changed and is now employing bunch of queer people working on and around Brave, but it was incredible important for Mozilla let him go - note: he was the one who stepped down.
> It wasn't Mozilla who financially contributed to "California’s infamous anti-gay referendum"
> Actions can cause consequences, even if it sometimes takes time
Can we collectively, as a society, be mature about these things?
Eich is allowed to hold those thoughts and donate to campaigns if he wants to. It has zero bearing on his ability to run an organization (as evidenced right up until his ousting) anymore than your viewpoints hold bearing on your ability to function in your job.
Just because you might disagree with his viewpoints doesn't mean he can't hold a job... it was absurd back when this happened, and it's all the more absurd today.
> but it was incredible important for Mozilla let him go
No it wasn't, and nothing changed because of it... it was just some temporary flare-up fake outrage all too prevalent on social media.
The idea that Mozilla, the organization that allowed itself to be overrun by neo-ideologs, is somehow going to be a good arbiter of a social media platform is laughable at best.
This is a fictional emotional ploy specifically designed to compel people to agree with you, lest they sound uncultured, uncaring or worse. That is the problem with our social discourse - it's hinged on cheap emotional "gotchas".
Eich wasn't walking down the halls of Mozilla, preaching his radical views and firing anyone who disagreed - yet that's exactly what happened to him. Ironic...
People need to be mature. You can have your views, and I'll have mine - at no point does any of that matter in the workplace unless someone isn't adult enough to separate the two spaces. This is what seems to have happened to Mozilla... overrun with neo-ideologs and forced everyone out that wasn't with "the program". How very inclusive...
I think the best social media experience is just to participate a little here, and little there, use email, have your own website, have a separate place for photos, a separate place for discussions, use relatively back-water like this, etc.
The reason is that without a massive, centralized network, no company can benefit from it in a mass-production advertising/factory sort of way like Facebook. That's exactly why I refuse to use Facebook and I've never had an account. Spread it around, and don't put all your eggs in one basket. In fact, I don't think we even need huge social media companies and we'd do just fine without them.
You need an always online instance that can be federated if you want to own your identity and social graph. If you don't care about that, then you can just create an account in your instance of choice and then use a wide range of tools to post and retrieve content (including a CLI I believe).
Why does a browser company need to own a social media space? I am an avid Firefox user but don't see any pragmatic point in this "exploration".
Maybe they want to own their instance and therefore control their identity? That kind of makes sense—we might see more of that from individual businesses in the future. But this announcement is not about that.
> Why does a browser company need to own a social media space?
Mozilla isn't a browser company, and did you read the post? All the examples cited where decentralized/federalized alternatives. They specifically DON'T wanna own anything
They literally say in the first sentence that they will run a public instance on Mozilla.Social. This means they will own that instance.
You could argue that no one owns anything exclusively in today's federalized world but that is not true in practical terms. They will own the identities/social graphs/content created locally. "Own" meaning they have total control over that instance and can, for example, enforce Mozilla-friendly policies, remove content, ban users (without the ability to export one's identity and social graph).
But Mastodon is specifically built against that. Users can freely migrate their accounts and all posts are still accessible on other instances (up to a point). The whole point of Mastodon is that users and their content have "exit".
If Mozilla does some weird shit with their instance, people can just... use a different instance. That's kinda the point. And Mozilla's instance will surely take the Mastodon Server Covenant which, among other things, requires users be notified at least 3 months ahead of time before a server gets shut down
You are misunderstanding federalization. People can migrate their account and social graph to a different instance _only_ if the current instance allows them to do that. If you are banned from Mozilla.social - you can't migrate. The instance owns you.
Are you *seriously* asking why they would be interested in the Fediverse ??
I think it's entirely valid to point out that for the last decade, Mozilla has been distracted with side projects that haven't gone anywhere (Firefox OS, Persona, etc), while the browser has languished. And now we see Mozilla pursuing yet another side project that, let's face it, will probably die an unmourned death in two or three years, while Firefox still languishes.
Furthermore, given that Mozilla very recently had a round of layoffs, ostensibly to cut the fat and refocus on the browser, where are they going to get the developer resources to work on this new project?
Imagine if Firefox OS would have gone somewhere. We would have an entirely open mobile OS right now, breaking up the duopoly of Google/Apple. I don't blame them for trying.
I do. Imagine if Mozilla, instead of trying to make another mobile OS to challenge the Apple/Google duopoly, had focused on making Firefox a top-tier browser, both on desktop and mobile? We might be in a situation today where, certainly on Android, there would be more than one option for a mobile browser.
We are rapidly regressing towards where the web was in 2002, only with Google Chrome taking the place of Internet Explorer. Could Mozilla have prevented this by focusing on Firefox? I don't know. What I do know is that they didn't even try.
What makes you say that Firefox isn't a top tier browser ? Including on Android ? (Where the cards are stacked against it, better dump Android at this point anyway.)
This goes double for when Firefox OS was around : 7-9 years ago.
If Firefox were a top tier browser it wouldn't have bugs that were old enough to legally purchase alcohol in the United States [1]. Or have bugs that are old enough to have a drivers' license [2]. It wouldn't have decade-old bugs that break AJAX forms [3]. It would correctly support prefetching links [4].
And those are just the outstanding bugs. In terms of performance, Firefox is still slower than Chrome. It still has more UI jank, even on Linux. The new plugin API still doesn't give extensions the same level of functionality that they had with the old API, despite years of promising otherwise. Its responses to interaction media queries are inconsistent, necessitating the creation of a test page [5] to determine what its actual responses are (W3C specifications? what are those?).
No, Firefox is not a top-tier browser. It's more privacy-preserving than Chrome, which is why I use it, but I will never claim that Firefox is a better browser.
Being worse than Chrome doesn't mean it's not top tier. Agreed about the old loss of functionality. At least performance is better now.
No, most people should be using a dumbphone these days, at least until we hackers get our shit together enough that alternatives Librem/Pinephone are good enough.
I don't think Firefox is in the place where it is today because of technological reasons. It's there because of Google's marketing power (i.e. putting Chrome ads on the front page and Gmail, and bundling it with Android) and bad marketing by Mozilla. If Firefox OS would have succeeded, it would have propped up Firefox along the way.
Good point about the layoffs, but, like startups, most side projects never go anywhere, why would you expect them to ?
Last I checked, the average failure rate of software projects was 90 % (which is a good thing, other kinds of projects, like bridges, can't afford to, and have to be "over"engineered).
Yes. I don't think they should invest into social media experiments. In my opinion they did a horrible job at that so far (Pocket was promising but is unusable because of its "social sharing" confusion). Social media introduces wrong incentives.
[reposting my earlier reply] Furthermore, I imagine the reason they are so keen to be a player in social media is because someone at Mozilla really promotes the idea that there is a community around Firefox (sure, Thunderbird, MDN, etc). There is no community. People who use a browser are not a community: we don't need a place to "hang out" because we all use Firefox. It's a ridiculous aspirational thinking that only moves Mozilla further into irrelevancy.
Why not, worked pretty well for Opera/Vivaldi despite them being closed source !
Also, ok, if not social media as a Mastodon instance, then what kind of project do you suggest they should start in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse ?
I can't tell if you are trolling or are serious. Neither Opera nor Vivaldi have succeeded as social media platforms. They experiment a lot with different features but remain a minuscule niche browser. If that's the inspiration for Mozilla - then sure, they should go all in into social media.
> in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse
What does that mean? What should Ableton Live or Pixelmator Pro do to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse?
I don't see how twitter is essential to the browser space. I can see how a site like del.icio.us is essential or flickr is essential or OneDrive/GDrive is essential. But not twitter.
This is nothing more than an open-source attempt at mastadon, and possible diversification for Mozilla.
We can expect more open source diversification attempts in the future.
BTW, where is an open source email service network? And open source identity service network? And open source password saver network?
E-mail has always been decentralized. But if you're looking for a feature-packed server/client, then maybe iRedMail and Roundcube will do?
As for identity service, in its early years OAuth had many service providers. But then the providers don't bother to maintain the service so many sites also stopped using OAuth as login alternative due to unreliabiliy of the feature.
For password saver, KeePass + (sync service of your choice) also works? (Personally, I don't use it)
I didn’t hear about keepass before. Mozilla used to have Firefox lockwise. But then retired it as a standalone service model. It would have been a great replacement to lastpass or Bitwarden. And a great way of entering the oauth service market. The other oauth players attached it to their primary service(s). Deactivate service means deactivation of oauth.
I had not heard of red mail or roundcube either. Mozilla stopped innovation on thunderbird and have now tried to go to thunderbird on mobile. What they sh/could be working on is “thunder nest” aka email server software.
I could be inferring something the OP didn't intend - but I took their comment to indicate Mozilla should "stay in their lane" and focus on making an incredible web browser - not some side project/distraction that will inevitably fail.
Additionally, firefox has an abysmal market share currently, about 3%, not much different than Samsung Browser of Opera. If Mozilla want to make a competitive browser, it may not be the best time to devote resources to having a me too offering that rides on a current wave of interest
Mozilla has been distracted with side projects and posturing for so many years... one has to wonder if they can even find their way back at this point.
What would Firefox have to include to draw people back? The browser is solid, IME, so I'm not sure what they'd be doing if not their side projects. Do they need to figure out some way to market it as a viable alternative to Chromes?
Well, for starters - they need to figure out why all the browser skinners (Edge, Brave, etc) keep using Chromium as a base instead of Firefox. I don't pretend to know the reasons - but I would wager there's some pretty good reasons Chromium is dominating that space.
Microsoft and Google are at total odds with each other - I can't imagine using Chromium as a base sent people skipping down the halls in Redmond.
One thing that they could do is make Firefox at least as responsive on iOS as Safari is.
I know that browsers on iOS are forced to use WebKit (although that might change soon[1]). But Safari is also using WebKit, and the lag that I get in Firefox when opening a new tab is testing my commitment to them.
not pissing off power users - who are the only people who use firefox - in an utterly futile attempt to attract the general population.
this plea - that many people had made over the years - falls on deaf ears. mozilla is now ran by the kind of people who knows better than its users what we need, and we're wrong if we disagree.
Important. Firefox got where it was partially because many of us installed it for coworkers and relatives and everyone else, not because ordinary users sat down to try to figure out what browsers existed and which one was better.
Towards the end, Firefox was an easy sell.
And, as you write, today they don't care or even actively resist when we try to help.
Copying Chrome perfectly won't get any their users back.
Funding all kinds of weird side projects won't get users back.
Amazing, resource-efficient skinning might get some people back.
Tree Style Tags and other plugins working amazingly well might get some users back.
And when they start listen and fix the things we report things can improve very rapidly.
There are also probably a number of other improvements that can be done (I've advocated looking into doing the same as asm.js, but with html and css: something like a put meta-tag announcing html-lite or html/asm or something in the head, use a restricted set of css and html that is rendering friendly and only uses these well thought out js-libraries and we will pass your code down a much more efficient rendering branch!)
Firefox market share is 7.1% on desktop - not great, but more than double the aggregate, which should tell you something. Competing with Chrome on Android or Safari on iOS is virtually impossible. The ability to sync bookmarks, passwords, credit cards, etc. through the primary browser on Android to the desktop, and/or vice versa, ended the competition. The problem for Firefox/Mozilla is that the landscape for distributing a browser changed in a highly unfavorable way for an independent developer. We're not going back to the old days without a competitive mobile landscape (not happening).
Now, that doesn't put Mozilla's decisions or operations beyond scrutiny, but set expectations reasonably. Firefox is already a competitive browser, and even dramatically leap-frogging Chrome would do nothing to market share.
Pretty much this. A 4% share would be better than a 3% share. The browser is still good, but the wider company just does weird shit.
I hope Firefox devs for the code and establish their own foundation, Id give Firefox money, but not Mozilla - I’m not interested in funding a bunch of wannabe tech bros weird exploration of projects destined to fail.
Not really, no. Marketshare is currently split roughly 3% Firefox, 18.7% Safari, 78.3% Chromium variants (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, etc). If Firefox disappeared almost nothing would change, which is not good. Ideally Firefox's share should at least equal Safari's so developers can't ignore it with impunity, and in a perfect world it'd be split evenly three ways so Google can't steamroll through when Mozilla and Apple disagree with them.
I too think that unfortunately, this is what will happen. There's practically no chance of Firefox for iOS making significant headway.
The only silver lining is that this might land Google in an antitrust lawsuit that forces them to spin Chromium and Blink off into a Mozilla-like nonprofit with wholly independent leadership, which is about the best outcome possible in a single-web-engine world.
Kinda off topic and really barking up the wrong tree. Mozilla is literally the only company maintaining a non-webkit browser (Blink is still a WK fork)
Afaik There’s no way to directly donate to firefox, which I would do, but there’s no chance I’ll be donating to Mozilla when they waste money on this kind of stuff.
So I assume the same people who would be paying for the social network.
Just this evening I was complaining to a friend that top show 150% CPU usage for Firefox and I don't know the reason because both about:performance and about:processes are useless. They weren't telling me look this horrible site is using up your CPU. My friend's response? Use Chromium.
That can profile the whole browser as a unit. It does try to record only active threads. There are ways to set it to record everything. https://chat.mozilla.org/?#/room/#perfteam:mozilla.org is good place to access the people who know more about the profiler than I.
Do we need this same type of comment on every single post about Mozilla/Firefox? Does it not get tiring after a while? Because they are definitely tiring to read.
Well, the comment is about Firefox not improving their browser and instead doing other things; I imagine the comments will continue until Firefox commits to improving their browser instead of doing other things.
Firefox is obviously being improved all the time, and also obviously an org can do many different things at the same time. Yet you still have a fire hose of these comments on every Mozilla/Firefox thread.
Like, what do these commenters think they're doing? Just venting that their pet issues of FOSS isn't being worked on? What's that supposed to accomplish? What normal human being reads such a comment and goes like 'oh yeah thanks rude asshole commenters, I get right on fixing that!'??
I don't want HN threads to be just endlessly and breathlessly complaining about people not doing shit they want. Pay up or do it yourself.
It is as close to an intervention as we can come. We are friends of firefox, yet again reminding it that we love it, but all love has limits, and Firefox is approaching the limits of our love. If it does not change its direction soon, it will be all alone out in the cold.
What’s tiring for some of us is seeing Mozilla make several announcements a year about projects nobody cares about except whoever came up with the idea and their social circle. From the outside the organization seems to be full of people looking to use the resources of a non-profit to launch something, valuable or not, then use the name recognition on their CV as a springboard.
Tbh, I'm not really sure what you mean. The Firefox browser seems really solid. It passes most all benchmarks on WPT. It's also very focused on compatibility which chrome and safari often have problems with. There's plenty of stuff (e.g. grid) that they've been ahead of the curve on. As a developer I can also say that the FF devtools are by far my favorite to use
What exactly is the issue with FF? I think their loss of market share has a lot more to do with exactly the stuff you're telling them not to focus on. The competitors have OSes (e.g. macOS, Android, Windows, ChromeOS) that heavily push defaults or sometimes even force it (e.g. iOS).
For browsers like FF, Opera, or Brave, there's already a bar of people having to go out of their way to download them. They have a "third party" feel to them
Built-in browsers will suck again. It's kind of inevitable. Look at Chrome and manifest v3. Inevitably what happens when a company has such a strong monopoly is a recession or downturn comes along and the first thing they cut/deprioritize is the thing they see no threat in losing market dominance in
Here we all are, talking on a heavily moderated forum that is meant to increase civility and reduce noise. If you think Mozilla's idea is bad, why are you here?
What exactly is the issue? I don't think just throwing more money or people at that specific work would increase velocity. At a certain point you get too many cooks in the kitchen
I think a lot of people are still disappointed that for example servo didn't make it to it's endgoal and the team behind it mostly got fired whilst the CEO increases her compensation, the board expands and money is given to things like letting artists examine ai impact. They want it to outperform chromium browsers instead of implementing 3 separate ways to save tabs across devices.
They want firefox to keep up in marketshare because it can keep as much as you want on your scoreboard... If it isn't used it ends up useless, dead and without a hand in webstandards. I still remember how many users it lost because google could switch video compression standards last second because ff could just be ignored leading to countless peers blaming firefox for being laggy with youtube open.
The community here is good in spite of, not because of, the moderation. The dang-era changes to "increase civility" have predictably lowered the quality of discussion - just look at threads from 10 or even 5 years ago and compare it to the barely-better-than-Reddit discussion we see now. For now there's still some legacy of the good old days to be found here, but I don't expect to stay much longer.
Interesting project, although in all likelihood vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars. Kinda like how school bullying appears everywhere, independent of culture.
That doesn’t mean that healthy places cannot exist or thrive, but it means that there will always be demand for the unhealthy. Tech impacts society, but we’re mistaken if we think we can change human nature.
I’d expect the outcome of the research to reach a different conclusion than people expect. For instance, I don’t think the typical system of likes and followers will ever be healthy. Beware of early results though, because it always takes a while for a platform to mature enough to see if it withstands the test of millions of users, socially speaking.
My WIP theory is: people-oriented public broadcast mediums always deteriorate towards the unhealthy with massive scale. You can have one or the other, but not both. (People oriented means that there is a strong focus on the people, usually with real name and face, or emphasizing the user/display name)
Anecdotally, to illustrate the point:
- LinkedIn became a cesspool despite having a professional boring focus. My theory: because it’s people-oriented and public.
- Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic, despite likes and reacts everywhere. My theory: private groups with implicit trust. No need to build your personal brand.
- GitHub has not deteriorated (a bit perhaps, but very much usable still), despite having likes, being a public broadcast medium. My take: it’s because it is mostly content oriented.
I think a big part (if not the most critical one) of this deterioration is the addition of algorithmic feeds. As soon as a company starts prioritizing content, it breaks the natural flow of a conversation we have in real life. This leads to group mixing, polarization, emotionally-charged content prevalence, etc.
I have never really used Twitter until very recently. It was shocking to me how much the algorithmic content insertion drives the conversation. E.g. I click on a link to read an individual thread: right in the middle of it, with almost no visual indication Twitter is inserting completely unrelated but "high engagement" content. It's brutal.
Edit: imagine group chats sorted by engagement... a pile of responses in a disconnected sequence. Someone said something funny that got 10 likes? Push it to the top for the next 2 hours! (I am tempted to build this as an experiment just to see how awful—or effective?—this would be like.)
And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the heads of Twitter cynically tuned the algorithm to reward anger. If it's human nature to love a good fight, then unguided ML would generate a black-box model that promoted angry posts.
I never really got those conspiracy theories. The big secret is they're tuning it to make money. Money in the ad-tech age of the internet means eyes on content and engagement. Anger and clickbait and such are all incredibly easy to tune for. Plus it's not just the algorithms that are tuned for it, people, including the "creators" on any platform, change their behavior to do "better" on the platform.
It's just a feedback loop optimized for "engagement" which is the metric these companies are using to make more money from the companies buying ad-space. Occam's razor and all that. It's just about money.
I think I remember Facebook was pretty toxic even before it had an algorithmic newsfeed. Maybe not as wild as now, but people being mean to each other and saying awful things was very much a thing. Same with oldschool forums, too.
People kind of go through a contrarian phase. I read something the other day, probably on Twitter, that to get the answer you want, you deliberately put out the wrong answer. And leach out the bile to get results.
I think there are still lots of people that are on-boarding. And over time they simmer down. Much is poor etiquette unwittingly forced, as we have finger fumbling interfaces.
The insane thing are the second order effects, people are actively tuning their content for maximum toxicity because they know the algorithm will reward them with likes, followers and perhaps real life clout, votes, money etc.
So the service social networks offer to their power users is a way for them to profit from the public discord they instigate.
It's everyone personal tabloid they can publish with zero barrier of entry or friction and an already hooked global audience.
I struggle reading threads on Twitter, just as I do on HN. If I could watch the thread grow organically perhaps possibly via a visual map, I'd stand a chance. Fork a thread on Twitter and content can end up totally buried. It's useless.
HN is far more simple in approach, but you only really stand a chance if you monitor your own thread. Kind of. So you just end up glancing this and that. Or trying to read something and then give up. Threads only get traction for about a day and people fall off reading them precisely because engagement requires a silly cognitive leap.
Natural conversations are a bit all over the place, but the brain is quite good at forming some kind of narrative. Despite participants sometimes have wildly differing interpretations. These aren't even apparent in the moment. Ruminating delays, and going back to conversations from yesterday doesn't much happen, unless you have quite an intimate relationship with someone, or you are very topic focused.
Throw many disjointed feeds into the mix, and how on earth do you navigate them, let alone participate in them.
About the only thing that kind of works for me when thinking back is something like newsnet, with basic topic threading. With well considered posts.
Very much agreed. Group chats and instant messaging are the prime social media platforms.
You won’t troll in group chats because you’ll be removed and it’s difficult or impossible to get back. Unlike public platforms where you can sign up for 300 new accounts behind vpns. The groups are small and everyone knows everyone so you’ll have a reputation beyond just being banned.
There’s also no global admins / thought police. Each group gets to decide on their own what kind of discourse is allowed (illegal content excepted). In a group chat your friends can discuss things which would have you banned from Facebook/etc. The platform won't push your content on others so independent group chats don't ruin the experience for other users.
Yeah 100%. Small chat rooms have been existing and thriving for years now. It didn't suddenly take the Twitter debacle to make them viable options. I mean, look at the drama spilling out of Twitter right now. There are HN posters posting 10-20 comments per day on every Twitter thread. Mastodon wasn't the beginning of private or small spaces on the net. I'm in dozens of them right now.
This makes me think that maybe Google Plus (God, what a shitty name), could have succeeded. The focus on sharing into circles of users who wanted your content would have made it a system where you pick who should view a given post. This circle-oriented sharing may have led to less self-promotion than the other platforms.
In practice the issue was few people understood and properly used circles. I mostly just used them to sort kinda a primary and secondary feed. One to keep up with, and one for casual browsing.
It's still just not as good as group chats. It has no community vibe as each person is posting to a different group of people. If I join a programming group chat, I'll get to know everyone there and the content will almost all be around the topic of the group. If I open something like Google Plus, it's going to be some content probably related to what I might like to see, but it's still just a public forum with no community.
I believe social media apps are much like markets, in that the structure of the app determines the incentives and the interactions that happen there. I think most would agree that the 140 character limit had a profound impact on Twitter, for better and for worse. This is why HN remains stripped down, without Reddit features like message alerts and visible karma for posts, and why the lists were stashed away; these features don't work towards curious conversation. The things you're citing about group chats are structural, as well.
We aren't doomed to terrible social media. But tech companies, with their particular incentives to drive engagement writ large rather than healthy engagement, may be structurally unable to deliver a good social media app.
They give it away for free, want growth year over year and are answerable to their investors. That’s not a recipe for creating user centric applications.
I think the fact that there is a public conversation about what is healthy vs. what is not is a huge step in the right direction, even if human nature means we’ll always be fighting.
I strongly believe that in a few decades (probably sooner), the traditional social media platforms will be seen as cigarettes. Some people will still partake, but no one has any misconception about the harm they cause.
Healthier alternatives will be important in the long run, even if there is no perfect technical solution.
I do like your theories about why certain networks have fared as they have, and hopefully Mozilla comes away with some insights that might lead to something that highlights the good parts.
And neither are the most toxic elements of the current big social media platforms.
Even just a return to the basics would go a long way: Show me my friends' stuff, in order, and don't show me anything else. Let me stay up to date without getting roped into bullshit promoted on my feed.
Highly manipulative algorithmic content promotion is not necessary to stay in touch.
At worst, a less toxic iteration of a social media platform is the equivalent of e-cigarettes. Still addictive and not super healthy, still unknown how this mode of consumption will impact humans long term, but less likely to kill you from the obvious kinds of cancer.
Sure, but the corporations have incentives to run things the way they're running them now, and users will aggregate to platforms others use, which will in turn be driven by addictiveness. And you're not going to quit a platform if it means losing touch with your friends and access to your data on it.
> vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars
If there was a social media network that could exclude these things, then smaller would be fine.
I remember Google Reader as a brief, well-balanced example of healthy social media platform. It was mostly text, the selection bias was in favor of users who were savvy enough to understand RSS, generally interested in an array of different things, no engagement algorithms. The blogosphere that drove much of the content at the time was wonkish, (more) independent, often irreverent but also sincere about what a better future for human civilization and politics could be like. Haven't seen another thing like it since.
Reader wasn't really a social platform for many of those reasons. It was its integration with Buzz that gave it the ability to share socially with friends
I don't think this was the case as I wasn't a Buzz user. And yes, it wasn't _really_ a social platform, but you could share items from your own feed to other mutuals and converse under the thread that you (or they) shared. A couple other readers like Inoreader and TheOldReader later implemented stuff like this, but without the large user base that Gmail had it was pointless.
School bullying is nowhere near universally consistent. It’s twice as common in the US as it is in the Netherlands for example and the difference between schools can be far more extreme.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The prevalence of bullying really does vary massively from country to country, school to school and even cohort to cohort.
Given how many people were very deeply and very personally affected by it, it's amazing that nobody's discovered how and why it spreads.
I think the more likely truth is that people crave utility and compelling novelty. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. all either had/have usefulness that their predecessors lacked or packaged themselves in a novel way that was enjoyable. No one cares social media is unhealthy because most people realize that 'unhealthy' in this scenario is more akin to the impact of fashion magazines on young women than the way in which smoking is bad for you.
Meanwhile Facebook groups and Facebook market are actually useful, Snapchat is handy for naughty convos, Instagram provided a more streamlined experience for people who actually cared about their wall on Facebook, and TikTok provided a less aggressively progressive video streaming service that offered tools to make content creation easy for Creators while providing Consumers with a wildly better recommendation algorithm than YouTube, mobile first design, and formatting requirements that ensured content is suited to the attention span of people on mobile.
You think school bullying is human nature? It might transcend culture, but I think it's a direct consequence of school as an institution. I mean, a school's proposition to students is basically this:
"You as a student have to spend most of your time with these strangers that we chose arbitrarily. If a conflict arises, you gotta figure it out on your own. Your parents won't be there to help you. Your friends may or may not be there to help you depending on how we choose (arbitrarily) to split you all up. If someone attacks you and you defend yourself, you'll be punished the same as them. If you refuse to participate in this arrangement, you're a criminal"
If I had to design an environment that was optimized to encourage and allow bullying to happen, it would look a lot like a school. Writing the phenomenon off as human nature seems super naive to me.
That's true. I think the other places where it happens often have similar dynamics to schools. For example, in a workplace you might not get to choose who you work with, or be able to leave easily. That's less true of other cases like bullying in teams or clubs though.
I just know that, personally, most of the times I experienced bullying in school happened when I was separated from my friends. I think that the natural tendency people have to look out for each other is stronger than any tendency towards bullying, but that schools disrupt the balance.
People seem to pile in once someone starts, that is how bullying works. If nobody starts then nobody piles in, but at scale with social media lots of people will start, so then the masses pile in a lot.
Did you ever have "friends" as a child? Bullying was brutal in and outside school, and I was part of both ends (trying to show strength by bullying others to try to stop being bullied).
Of relevance to the topic, the people who study bullying see it as a group dynamic. Apparently this is true across cultures but some cultures prefer to think of it as an individual "bully", rather than a social process that everyone participates in by allowing it to happen.
My only experience of school bullying is purely anecdotal, from parents of kids suffering from it. The problem seems to be that a kid gets bullied, tells parent/teachers and the school then does everything it can to pretend it isn't happening.
The reputation of a school trumps anything else, it would seem?
Part of the purpose is to prepare you for the real world, which is far more brutal. Though bullying tends to be more subtle. Grownups have their lunch money taken all the time.
Your comment makes me wonder if bullying isn't like the alpha wolf thing in nature- seen only in captivity and a consequence of the need for a sense of control in an environment you can't otherwise control.
Yeah there’s always instances of toxicity on anything large, even group chats like slack for instance. I am talking about overall trends on a large scale, which is hard to measure and subjective – but think of healthy as “producing more oxygen than it consumes” and vice versa for unhealthy. It’s just the least wrong but still general model I’ve been able to come up with. YMMV.
I don't think it's even country specific. There are just groups and groups. One has hundreds of users, most of which you don't know and the other is 5 of your friends that you talk to every week in person. One will be more likely problematic... (but also much easier to leave)
Don't discount the damage done by everyone looking for a way to get rich quick. I think something that has driven social online media (in the broadest sense) to become the cesspool it is now, is that people are building their "brand" to profit in some way or the other. This is not to say that previous online communities were not toxic, far from it (lots of epic usenet flamewars to proof the point), however largely people were not trying to "break the system" to somehow make money from it (similar to how spam has almost broken email).
Seems a bit like saying "there will always be demand for cigarettes". Social norms and "nudges" like no-smoking areas can go a long way.
People don't set out to have toxic experiences on social media -- they get sucked in and succumb to bad incentives.
Hacker News seems pretty good. Youtube comments have gotten better.
We're in the early stages here. Only a narrow range of platforms have been tried, and they've mostly been optimized for engagement rather than human wellbeing.
The more “focused” a group is, the more civil it is, or if it is too broad it needs extremely strict moderation.
A good example is reddit, where the large subs like r/politics and r/worldnews are just cesspools like twitter comments and the more smaller and finely grained ones have serious and useful discussion.
It’d be interesting to see what would happen if Twitter copped the Reddit model. Separate forums dedicated to specific topics; moderated and isolated from the hellscape of the public space.
Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic
I've found several group chats to be deeply problematic (though of course I accept the possibility I could be the problem).
By definition they encourage group-think, and that, coupled with the lack of requirements for being a moderator (and the attraction of the role to narcissists and control-types) can be a pretty toxic mix.
Critically reflecting on the harms of social media is a commendable effort. But I think this analysis and the implied conclusion is superficial and misguided:
In private hands our choice is limited, toxicity is rewarded, rage is called engagement, public trust is corroded, and basic human decency is often an afterthought.
On a platform that is not centralized but consists of smaller competing providers, the incentives are the same for each provider: to maximize engagement. And given our current experience, the most effective way to do it is to incite anger and fear.
Decentralization does nothing to address the core problem.
To my knowledge there isn't any one fediverse server that is being run to raise revenue. If there's any money involved it's usually for running the servers.
Why are the incentives for each provider to drive engagement? If I host a small server in the Fediverse, maybe I don't want/need engagement but happy users who appreciate a healthy community and are willing to pay a dollar a month to keep it running.
I can compete with other providers, but I don't need to out-compete them.
Mozilla comes to this equation with their totally out of touch bullshit approach. Just like they fucked up their browser market share, now they are the missionaries of privacy and the people and the trees and world peace. While 99% of people do not know jackshit about all this. Therefore they DON'T CARE. Imagine how successful will this become.
What about federation makes social media healthy? From what I've seen, the problems that keep coming up are not related to the network architecture, they're more about how people cannot relate to each other in a healthy way. If Mozilla has a solution to this, they should get a Nobel Peace Prize. On the other hand, if their idea is "this time it'll work, because it's us doing it" then I'm pretty skeptical.
Yes, with one caveat: without algorithmic feeds users tend to form natural circles just like in real life. This dramatically reduces toxicity. Just let people post whatever they want and follow whoever they want. If a social media company will not attempt to mix and promote random high engagement content, users will far less likely discover it by themselves and engage in toxic behavior.
I don’t use Firefox much, but when I do the first thing I do is go to settings and uncheck “let Firefox install and run studies.”
It’s good they have that option. Even though they are to good guys, I find it creepy they would run studies on people without consent. Hopefully they don’t do creepy stuff like that on the fediverse, but honestly the whole thing with pocket makes me doubt their intentions. They seem to talk the talk, but then do creepy stuff in the background.
Elon Musk bought Twitter so a "healthy social media alternative" is needed, one in which you should get "cancelled" if you disagree with the notion that "vociferous minorities" should be able to change the generally accepted meanings of words.
OMG that's Steve Texeira!! How did he go from being an evangelist and writing excellent books on the unmatched RAD IDE known as Delphi, to indulging in "Wokespeak" on behalf of Mozilla?
I wonder if Mozilla needs to be given the Elon treatment too. Getting rid of everyone except those responsible for the core browser functionality might be a good start.
I find this disappointing. The world does not need alternative social media. Everything in our society is geared towards "Bigger, Faster, Broader === Better!". But it has completely ignored humanity and quality. The world needs less social media, full stop. Devoting resources to this is is a waste of time. In my opinion (and I recognize the irony of posting this online) fewer people deserve an audience. Fewer people (and companies) should be given a platform. Fewer hours should be drowned in the cesspools that are online communities. Fewer eyeballs on the internet is what we should be aiming for.
The internet, and especially social media, is a great disruptor. A disruptor of community. Sure, it creates fluidity and eases the ability to interact. This is not really a positive, as a whole. Neutral at best. Efforts should instead be focused on fostering actual, face-to-face interactions. Online 'communities' are a disgustingly poor facsimile of interactions in the flesh. I mean, seriously, look what we've sacrificed. All for what? Phones that bombard us with notifications that someone said the content we posted was shit? Ads being shoved down our throats to try to monetize the activity of simply existing? Having the ability to leave racist comments on Youtube while you're taking a shit?
I'm an atheist, but I have remarked to my dad that I somewhat mourn both the loss of religious centers and offices. They formed critical venues for actually meeting people, humanizing and understanding them, building relationships and friendships, discussing differences with immediate realization of consequence for ones words/actions. The internet is a fucking disgrace compared to that.
Mozilla should build a series of cafes or something, in small-to-medium towns and cities. Foster actual, face-to-face, unscalable human connection. An unrealistic expectation, for sure. But goddamn could the world use some of that these days.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadhttps://growyourown.services/making-your-own-mastodon-server...
This website has some instructions and pointers that might be helpful.
ps: as I found out while setting up my own server, diaspora is its own thing, it can't federate with ActivityPub services.
Decentralizing has nothing at all to do with these core issues.
I hate Facebook and Twitter as much as the next person, but maybe humans haven't evolved to be able to instantly reach an audience of thousands or millions without any personal or social risk. People have been dangerous and inhuman for many years in the past on a grand scale, but now every human can exist on a grand scale, and maybe the results of that alone are often unsavory.
Bingo. I do not believe for a moment that social media company A or B is worsening society. Heck, Facebook links your presumably real identity to your content and people are still disgusting online.
No company will win by not rewarding “interesting content”. We tried that, it was called forums, and they lost out to more “rewarding” communities.
If you don't like it, don't follow them.
Marketing might hijack these groups to sell things, but I don't think just the act of memeing to be marketing or selling anything.
If a platform like WT Social could gain traction it might work as a sustainable alternative because it lacks that desperate drive to squeeze cash out of people's brains. Currently I'm really enjoying BeReal, but I know it's a matter of time until their fun and playful mechanics turn dark.
No. That's not the problem.
Remove all ads from Twitter or Facebook, bestow a quadrillion-dollar endowment on them, and they'll still turn into shitty, toxic cesspits, because of the way the algorithms bring different people together... In a way that tends to maximize anger.
Now, it's true that 'maximizing engagement' was the reason that those algorithms were built the way they were, but that's only tangential to chasing ad revenue. As long as there's work being done on growing the network, regardless of the reason, the temptation to build it out in that toxic manner will be present.
Remember how they started out without "algorithms", only a time-ordered feed ?
A completely opposite counter-example : fitness memberships don't care about your "engagement", only that your keep paying your monthly subscription.
Seems like Mozilla is just hopping onto the decentralization/Mastodon bandwagon; where was Mozilla when Mastodon was a fledging new company?
https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/official-mozilla-presence-on...
And never we forget that Mozilla talked about integrating moderations into their own browser...
And the comments have been good and constructive...
Similar to how a post here on HN can have five comments, and the same post on Reddit five hundred. Four hundred trying to make funny quips, ninety trolling, and the rest hidden in the noise. Yet on HN at least three offer real insights, ask good questions etc.
Threads and conversations on the fediverse, currently, are just so much more engaging, positive, insigtfull than on Twitter, it's bonkers. But also in sheer numbers. The same post on twitter gets far less engagement than on fediverse: measured entirely unscientific, but visible nonetheless.
Probably a cynical view of the world but I just remembered it while reading your comment.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter are nothing more than ML driven data collectors at this point.
Obviously content is king, the average user wants their Instagram stars or whatever, they aren’t concerned with politics.
But I’m optimistic to a major schism in ALL these mediocre platforms.
I want to see more corporations hosting their own, Chik Fil A, BestBuy, anything to break the tide.
This is quite an odd take... especially given one of the largest social media companies was recently bought in part because of overtly unbalanced political censorship on the platform.
Are there various political ideas on all social platforms? Sure... I guess if you look hard enough. You won't find everyone equally stifled in reach, however, which is the problem.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/22/twitter-a...
If carefully taking in their contents is an inconvenience for you, I’ll spell it out: the general narrative you’re invoking about twitter was always paired with specific pretense that it was conservative views that were somehow being unfairly squashed in discourse on twitter. To the surprise of no one who actually observed discourse on twitter (or understands certain frequent flaws in conservative psychology) it actually turns out that’s not true; they were plenty well represented and even arguably overamplified.
Does this mean progressives were oppressed on twitter? You tell me — if you want to tell the story that even progressive representation is the real problem to be solved on social media, be my guest. But it ain’t gonna stop it from being obvious that the story of twitter’s purchase as a virtuous crusade to bring balance to discourse where conservatives just couldn’t get fair treatment doesn’t hold water — in addition, of course, to the ways the ensuing circus has made it clear that balance not the new owner’s motivation.
Generally speaking, link-only responses are frowned upon on HN. You're supposed to provide a thoughtful comment that adds to the discussion.
Besides, as previously mentioned - those links do not support whatever argument you're trying to make.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/04/brendan-eich-homoph...
> Actions can cause consequences, even if it sometimes takes time
Can we collectively, as a society, be mature about these things?
Eich is allowed to hold those thoughts and donate to campaigns if he wants to. It has zero bearing on his ability to run an organization (as evidenced right up until his ousting) anymore than your viewpoints hold bearing on your ability to function in your job.
Just because you might disagree with his viewpoints doesn't mean he can't hold a job... it was absurd back when this happened, and it's all the more absurd today.
> but it was incredible important for Mozilla let him go
No it wasn't, and nothing changed because of it... it was just some temporary flare-up fake outrage all too prevalent on social media.
The idea that Mozilla, the organization that allowed itself to be overrun by neo-ideologs, is somehow going to be a good arbiter of a social media platform is laughable at best.
Eich wasn't walking down the halls of Mozilla, preaching his radical views and firing anyone who disagreed - yet that's exactly what happened to him. Ironic...
People need to be mature. You can have your views, and I'll have mine - at no point does any of that matter in the workplace unless someone isn't adult enough to separate the two spaces. This is what seems to have happened to Mozilla... overrun with neo-ideologs and forced everyone out that wasn't with "the program". How very inclusive...
The reason is that without a massive, centralized network, no company can benefit from it in a mass-production advertising/factory sort of way like Facebook. That's exactly why I refuse to use Facebook and I've never had an account. Spread it around, and don't put all your eggs in one basket. In fact, I don't think we even need huge social media companies and we'd do just fine without them.
Let's say I want to post text for a few people who follow me, and follow a handful of other accounts on mastodon or whatever.
What is the absolute minimum I'd need to connect to "the fediverse?" Is there a CLI thingy I can just run to fetch posts, or to create posts?
Maybe they want to own their instance and therefore control their identity? That kind of makes sense—we might see more of that from individual businesses in the future. But this announcement is not about that.
Mozilla isn't a browser company, and did you read the post? All the examples cited where decentralized/federalized alternatives. They specifically DON'T wanna own anything
You could argue that no one owns anything exclusively in today's federalized world but that is not true in practical terms. They will own the identities/social graphs/content created locally. "Own" meaning they have total control over that instance and can, for example, enforce Mozilla-friendly policies, remove content, ban users (without the ability to export one's identity and social graph).
If Mozilla does some weird shit with their instance, people can just... use a different instance. That's kinda the point. And Mozilla's instance will surely take the Mastodon Server Covenant which, among other things, requires users be notified at least 3 months ahead of time before a server gets shut down
Are you seriously asking why they would be interested in the Fediverse ??
Were you questioning Opera (now Vivaldi) when they were experimenting with all those weird browser features ?
Furthermore, given that Mozilla very recently had a round of layoffs, ostensibly to cut the fat and refocus on the browser, where are they going to get the developer resources to work on this new project?
We are rapidly regressing towards where the web was in 2002, only with Google Chrome taking the place of Internet Explorer. Could Mozilla have prevented this by focusing on Firefox? I don't know. What I do know is that they didn't even try.
This goes double for when Firefox OS was around : 7-9 years ago.
And those are just the outstanding bugs. In terms of performance, Firefox is still slower than Chrome. It still has more UI jank, even on Linux. The new plugin API still doesn't give extensions the same level of functionality that they had with the old API, despite years of promising otherwise. Its responses to interaction media queries are inconsistent, necessitating the creation of a test page [5] to determine what its actual responses are (W3C specifications? what are those?).
No, Firefox is not a top-tier browser. It's more privacy-preserving than Chrome, which is why I use it, but I will never claim that Firefox is a better browser.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10212
[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317081
[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654072
[4]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1527334
[5]: https://demos.obormot.net/interaction-media-query-test
EDIT:
Dump Android for what, exactly? An even more user-hostile platform, like iOS?No, most people should be using a dumbphone these days, at least until we hackers get our shit together enough that alternatives Librem/Pinephone are good enough.
Last I checked, the average failure rate of software projects was 90 % (which is a good thing, other kinds of projects, like bridges, can't afford to, and have to be "over"engineered).
[reposting my earlier reply] Furthermore, I imagine the reason they are so keen to be a player in social media is because someone at Mozilla really promotes the idea that there is a community around Firefox (sure, Thunderbird, MDN, etc). There is no community. People who use a browser are not a community: we don't need a place to "hang out" because we all use Firefox. It's a ridiculous aspirational thinking that only moves Mozilla further into irrelevancy.
Also, ok, if not social media as a Mastodon instance, then what kind of project do you suggest they should start in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse ?
> in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse
What does that mean? What should Ableton Live or Pixelmator Pro do to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse?
This is nothing more than an open-source attempt at mastadon, and possible diversification for Mozilla.
We can expect more open source diversification attempts in the future.
BTW, where is an open source email service network? And open source identity service network? And open source password saver network?
> BTW, where is an open source email service network?
That's what most email that isnt run by Google and Microsoft has always been...
And I mean open source email server. Something like an alternative to an enhanced email server like ms exchange or even gmail.
Like I said, all of the other ones are open source.. There's dozens. This seems like you just don't know about them.
As for identity service, in its early years OAuth had many service providers. But then the providers don't bother to maintain the service so many sites also stopped using OAuth as login alternative due to unreliabiliy of the feature.
For password saver, KeePass + (sync service of your choice) also works? (Personally, I don't use it)
I had not heard of red mail or roundcube either. Mozilla stopped innovation on thunderbird and have now tried to go to thunderbird on mobile. What they sh/could be working on is “thunder nest” aka email server software.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Microsoft and Google are at total odds with each other - I can't imagine using Chromium as a base sent people skipping down the halls in Redmond.
I know that browsers on iOS are forced to use WebKit (although that might change soon[1]). But Safari is also using WebKit, and the lag that I get in Firefox when opening a new tab is testing my commitment to them.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/14/apple-considering-non-w...
this plea - that many people had made over the years - falls on deaf ears. mozilla is now ran by the kind of people who knows better than its users what we need, and we're wrong if we disagree.
Towards the end, Firefox was an easy sell.
And, as you write, today they don't care or even actively resist when we try to help.
Copying Chrome perfectly won't get any their users back.
Funding all kinds of weird side projects won't get users back.
Amazing, resource-efficient skinning might get some people back.
Tree Style Tags and other plugins working amazingly well might get some users back.
And when they start listen and fix the things we report things can improve very rapidly.
There are also probably a number of other improvements that can be done (I've advocated looking into doing the same as asm.js, but with html and css: something like a put meta-tag announcing html-lite or html/asm or something in the head, use a restricted set of css and html that is rendering friendly and only uses these well thought out js-libraries and we will pass your code down a much more efficient rendering branch!)
Now, that doesn't put Mozilla's decisions or operations beyond scrutiny, but set expectations reasonably. Firefox is already a competitive browser, and even dramatically leap-frogging Chrome would do nothing to market share.
I hope Firefox devs for the code and establish their own foundation, Id give Firefox money, but not Mozilla - I’m not interested in funding a bunch of wannabe tech bros weird exploration of projects destined to fail.
The only silver lining is that this might land Google in an antitrust lawsuit that forces them to spin Chromium and Blink off into a Mozilla-like nonprofit with wholly independent leadership, which is about the best outcome possible in a single-web-engine world.
so I see today as fairly diverse
So I assume the same people who would be paying for the social network.
It feels like Mozilla does EVERYTHING except improving Firefox.
Like, what do these commenters think they're doing? Just venting that their pet issues of FOSS isn't being worked on? What's that supposed to accomplish? What normal human being reads such a comment and goes like 'oh yeah thanks rude asshole commenters, I get right on fixing that!'??
I don't want HN threads to be just endlessly and breathlessly complaining about people not doing shit they want. Pay up or do it yourself.
What exactly is the issue with FF? I think their loss of market share has a lot more to do with exactly the stuff you're telling them not to focus on. The competitors have OSes (e.g. macOS, Android, Windows, ChromeOS) that heavily push defaults or sometimes even force it (e.g. iOS).
For browsers like FF, Opera, or Brave, there's already a bar of people having to go out of their way to download them. They have a "third party" feel to them
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable
What exactly is the issue? I don't think just throwing more money or people at that specific work would increase velocity. At a certain point you get too many cooks in the kitchen
They want firefox to keep up in marketshare because it can keep as much as you want on your scoreboard... If it isn't used it ends up useless, dead and without a hand in webstandards. I still remember how many users it lost because google could switch video compression standards last second because ff could just be ignored leading to countless peers blaming firefox for being laggy with youtube open.
It's worse now.
That doesn’t mean that healthy places cannot exist or thrive, but it means that there will always be demand for the unhealthy. Tech impacts society, but we’re mistaken if we think we can change human nature.
I’d expect the outcome of the research to reach a different conclusion than people expect. For instance, I don’t think the typical system of likes and followers will ever be healthy. Beware of early results though, because it always takes a while for a platform to mature enough to see if it withstands the test of millions of users, socially speaking.
My WIP theory is: people-oriented public broadcast mediums always deteriorate towards the unhealthy with massive scale. You can have one or the other, but not both. (People oriented means that there is a strong focus on the people, usually with real name and face, or emphasizing the user/display name)
Anecdotally, to illustrate the point:
- LinkedIn became a cesspool despite having a professional boring focus. My theory: because it’s people-oriented and public.
- Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic, despite likes and reacts everywhere. My theory: private groups with implicit trust. No need to build your personal brand.
- GitHub has not deteriorated (a bit perhaps, but very much usable still), despite having likes, being a public broadcast medium. My take: it’s because it is mostly content oriented.
I have never really used Twitter until very recently. It was shocking to me how much the algorithmic content insertion drives the conversation. E.g. I click on a link to read an individual thread: right in the middle of it, with almost no visual indication Twitter is inserting completely unrelated but "high engagement" content. It's brutal.
Edit: imagine group chats sorted by engagement... a pile of responses in a disconnected sequence. Someone said something funny that got 10 likes? Push it to the top for the next 2 hours! (I am tempted to build this as an experiment just to see how awful—or effective?—this would be like.)
It's just a feedback loop optimized for "engagement" which is the metric these companies are using to make more money from the companies buying ad-space. Occam's razor and all that. It's just about money.
I think there are still lots of people that are on-boarding. And over time they simmer down. Much is poor etiquette unwittingly forced, as we have finger fumbling interfaces.
So the service social networks offer to their power users is a way for them to profit from the public discord they instigate.
It's everyone personal tabloid they can publish with zero barrier of entry or friction and an already hooked global audience.
HN is far more simple in approach, but you only really stand a chance if you monitor your own thread. Kind of. So you just end up glancing this and that. Or trying to read something and then give up. Threads only get traction for about a day and people fall off reading them precisely because engagement requires a silly cognitive leap.
Natural conversations are a bit all over the place, but the brain is quite good at forming some kind of narrative. Despite participants sometimes have wildly differing interpretations. These aren't even apparent in the moment. Ruminating delays, and going back to conversations from yesterday doesn't much happen, unless you have quite an intimate relationship with someone, or you are very topic focused.
Throw many disjointed feeds into the mix, and how on earth do you navigate them, let alone participate in them.
About the only thing that kind of works for me when thinking back is something like newsnet, with basic topic threading. With well considered posts.
Apologies for adding to the noise.
You won’t troll in group chats because you’ll be removed and it’s difficult or impossible to get back. Unlike public platforms where you can sign up for 300 new accounts behind vpns. The groups are small and everyone knows everyone so you’ll have a reputation beyond just being banned.
There’s also no global admins / thought police. Each group gets to decide on their own what kind of discourse is allowed (illegal content excepted). In a group chat your friends can discuss things which would have you banned from Facebook/etc. The platform won't push your content on others so independent group chats don't ruin the experience for other users.
We aren't doomed to terrible social media. But tech companies, with their particular incentives to drive engagement writ large rather than healthy engagement, may be structurally unable to deliver a good social media app.
I strongly believe that in a few decades (probably sooner), the traditional social media platforms will be seen as cigarettes. Some people will still partake, but no one has any misconception about the harm they cause.
Healthier alternatives will be important in the long run, even if there is no perfect technical solution.
I do like your theories about why certain networks have fared as they have, and hopefully Mozilla comes away with some insights that might lead to something that highlights the good parts.
Even just a return to the basics would go a long way: Show me my friends' stuff, in order, and don't show me anything else. Let me stay up to date without getting roped into bullshit promoted on my feed.
Highly manipulative algorithmic content promotion is not necessary to stay in touch.
At worst, a less toxic iteration of a social media platform is the equivalent of e-cigarettes. Still addictive and not super healthy, still unknown how this mode of consumption will impact humans long term, but less likely to kill you from the obvious kinds of cancer.
If there was a social media network that could exclude these things, then smaller would be fine.
I remember Google Reader as a brief, well-balanced example of healthy social media platform. It was mostly text, the selection bias was in favor of users who were savvy enough to understand RSS, generally interested in an array of different things, no engagement algorithms. The blogosphere that drove much of the content at the time was wonkish, (more) independent, often irreverent but also sincere about what a better future for human civilization and politics could be like. Haven't seen another thing like it since.
Its limitations were part of what made it thrive.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092217/bullying-in-euro...
https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp
Which suggests the rates are comparable between the US and Denmark.
Netherlands is 12% far to the right on the top link you just used, and it shows a huge range between countries.
The second link you used had 20.2% for the US.
PS: Did you think Netherlands and Denmark was the same country or something?
Given how many people were very deeply and very personally affected by it, it's amazing that nobody's discovered how and why it spreads.
Meanwhile Facebook groups and Facebook market are actually useful, Snapchat is handy for naughty convos, Instagram provided a more streamlined experience for people who actually cared about their wall on Facebook, and TikTok provided a less aggressively progressive video streaming service that offered tools to make content creation easy for Creators while providing Consumers with a wildly better recommendation algorithm than YouTube, mobile first design, and formatting requirements that ensured content is suited to the attention span of people on mobile.
"You as a student have to spend most of your time with these strangers that we chose arbitrarily. If a conflict arises, you gotta figure it out on your own. Your parents won't be there to help you. Your friends may or may not be there to help you depending on how we choose (arbitrarily) to split you all up. If someone attacks you and you defend yourself, you'll be punished the same as them. If you refuse to participate in this arrangement, you're a criminal"
If I had to design an environment that was optimized to encourage and allow bullying to happen, it would look a lot like a school. Writing the phenomenon off as human nature seems super naive to me.
I just know that, personally, most of the times I experienced bullying in school happened when I was separated from my friends. I think that the natural tendency people have to look out for each other is stronger than any tendency towards bullying, but that schools disrupt the balance.
The reputation of a school trumps anything else, it would seem?
If books had a comment section they would be toxic.
Even this site gets toxic in the comments, there isn't any brand building, no real reason to collect likes.
Github can get toxic in pr comments.
Toxic behavior gets encouraged by likes and stuff. Ime the worst message boards were the ones with reputation that could be awarded or taken away.
Group chats have a social repercussions for being an ass. The internet doesn't for the most part.
This is a person who has never seen what WhatsApp groups look like in Brazil or India.
Seems a bit like saying "there will always be demand for cigarettes". Social norms and "nudges" like no-smoking areas can go a long way.
People don't set out to have toxic experiences on social media -- they get sucked in and succumb to bad incentives.
Hacker News seems pretty good. Youtube comments have gotten better.
We're in the early stages here. Only a narrow range of platforms have been tried, and they've mostly been optimized for engagement rather than human wellbeing.
I've found several group chats to be deeply problematic (though of course I accept the possibility I could be the problem).
By definition they encourage group-think, and that, coupled with the lack of requirements for being a moderator (and the attraction of the role to narcissists and control-types) can be a pretty toxic mix.
Decentralization does nothing to address the core problem.
I can compete with other providers, but I don't need to out-compete them.
1. a platform to speak their mind (basically can type anything) 2. is public (as opposed to private like Discord servers)
then you will get everything bad about social media even without the for-profit incentives.
It’s good they have that option. Even though they are to good guys, I find it creepy they would run studies on people without consent. Hopefully they don’t do creepy stuff like that on the fediverse, but honestly the whole thing with pocket makes me doubt their intentions. They seem to talk the talk, but then do creepy stuff in the background.
Elon Musk bought Twitter so a "healthy social media alternative" is needed, one in which you should get "cancelled" if you disagree with the notion that "vociferous minorities" should be able to change the generally accepted meanings of words.
OMG that's Steve Texeira!! How did he go from being an evangelist and writing excellent books on the unmatched RAD IDE known as Delphi, to indulging in "Wokespeak" on behalf of Mozilla?
It took humans thousands of years just to be civilised in a physical society. Hopefully it's faster online.
The internet, and especially social media, is a great disruptor. A disruptor of community. Sure, it creates fluidity and eases the ability to interact. This is not really a positive, as a whole. Neutral at best. Efforts should instead be focused on fostering actual, face-to-face interactions. Online 'communities' are a disgustingly poor facsimile of interactions in the flesh. I mean, seriously, look what we've sacrificed. All for what? Phones that bombard us with notifications that someone said the content we posted was shit? Ads being shoved down our throats to try to monetize the activity of simply existing? Having the ability to leave racist comments on Youtube while you're taking a shit?
I'm an atheist, but I have remarked to my dad that I somewhat mourn both the loss of religious centers and offices. They formed critical venues for actually meeting people, humanizing and understanding them, building relationships and friendships, discussing differences with immediate realization of consequence for ones words/actions. The internet is a fucking disgrace compared to that.
Mozilla should build a series of cafes or something, in small-to-medium towns and cities. Foster actual, face-to-face, unscalable human connection. An unrealistic expectation, for sure. But goddamn could the world use some of that these days.