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Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon (techcrunch.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw.... existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement... "

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[–] 125 points 2 years ago (36 children)

Where do you get that from? I have no love for tankies, but from what I've seen, they've built a product that's free of their biases, opensourced it and thrown it over the wall with no strings attached.

If you want to make a rooten-tooten white supremacist nazi instance with Lemmy, you can do exactly that. Nobody has to federate with you, and you don't have to federate with them.

Strange take.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    While I generally agree with you, you can't call that a strange take.

    Their views are concerning, but so far I haven't seen them trying to force their views anywhere yet. And having a fork as a real option helps mitigate a lot of that risk.

    I'm certainly okay with the $50k/year they're trying to make for working on this full time. I'd be fine with triple that.

    If it gets out of hand, we have options. They're aware of that (in fact offered it), and have been acting appropriately afaik.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    The bottom line is, they started something that's bigger than them, and created more than enough tools to fork from them if they become a problem.

    I always like to point to Emby/Jellyfin as a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. They created something excellent, the community joined in, and it got popular. Then the maintainers decided to try and cash in, and the community immediately responded by forking into what would become Jellyfin. And nowadays, the discussion is between Plex vs Jellyfin, you rarely ever hear people talk about Emby anymore.

    After a certain point of user adoption, FOSS (and copy-left) software should be able to stand on it's own without the creator's direct involvement. The community can take the wheel if necessary. The Lemmy devs have provided enough tools to do exactly that, and I believe there are more than enough experienced devs in this community that we would not struggle to find the necessary talent.

    That's doesn't mean there isn't still a risk, though. This is social media, the technology is only half the story. The other half is getting people to move. I don't think I need to explain to anyone here how hard it is to get an entrenched user base to abandon a platform whose mainteners have gone off the rails.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Funny enough the post right below this one in my subscribed feed was a post from db0 asking about setting up media servers. And both of the top two comments recommend jellyfin, nobody recommended emby

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    Also: OPNsense. That wasn't even a case of going closed, it was Netgate making weird decisions regarding hardware encryption support. Of course, since then, Netgate has fallen completely off the wagon and done some incredibly stupid and harmful things.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    If someone brings a toy to class, it's wild to me to say that if the whole class likes it enough, they must donate their toy. If you love it, go make your own - hell, just copy it exactly as it is and make adjustments from there.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago* (10 children)

    Strange take.

    Not for folks who have been following the development. It’s one thing if it’s just a couple of devs working on the project and trying their best, it’s an entirely different thing when a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues. It's become a pattern and will almost certainly continue. At this point a significant number of users have been lost because the devs have been largely unable to capitalize on previous waves on growth due to slow development. Because of all this Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago

    This is the first I've heard of "a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues" and "Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute".

    Can you give a summary or examples? I'm not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don't follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn't aware of any of this.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I dont know much about the primary developers of Lemmy, but from what I can tell this is a part time labor of love project for them. Its unreasonable to ask people to push beyond their boundaries or capacity so that their pet project can become a 1:1 replacement for an incredibly mature platform like Reddit overnight

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    It’s one thing if it’s just a couple of devs working on the project and trying their best, it’s an entirely different thing when a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues.

    To the detriment of the community, the admins, and the concept of the fediverse overall.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago*

    Unfortunately opinions do not always match.

    If a large group of people do not agree with the direction the Lemmy devs are making, why not get together and create a new site forked off Lemmy's source code?

    It seems like the fediverse is a return to a more liquid internet, similar to the early internet of the 90s. A lack of existing large infrastructure here is actually advantageous for new sites to startup.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I dont know much about the primary developers of Lemmy,

    With respect, maybe you shouldn't be commenting on what's going on behind the scenes. They are good developers but they're not good leaders or shepherds of such a big project. They need to hand over stewardship to someone that can be trusted.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago

    Its unreasonable to ask people to push beyond their boundaries or capacity so that their pet project can become a 1:1 replacement for an incredibly mature platform

    Sometimes things become bigger than just what they were before, take on a life of their own.

    When it gets to a humanity community level need then maybe the devs should turn it over to others who can do that, or at least accept the help of others who have been trying to help them grow it more/better.

    We have a responsibility to ourselves, but we also have a responsibility to each other.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Sounds like you should fork it.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I would love to contribute but I don't have the experience for a fork. This is kind of the essence of the whole problem though. Plenty of unutilized contributors who could be driving this project forward but are having a hard time getting involved.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    This sort of thing happens in every opensource project; the maintainer(s) have a vision for the product and whatever amount of time they can use to review contributions and PRs. Some PRs are utter messes, some are good but complex, others are good but either are not going to be supportable with the current manpower or will be superceded by codebase changes in the future. And then these contributors get upset their PRs aren't being taken seriously. They as well are welcome to fork it and they could even use patches from the original branch as they develop their forks, and presumably implement them in production. But more often than not, they just move on because they don't have much invested.

    It's every maintainers balance that has to be determined, and not everyone is going to be happy. They might want a slow development pace because fast paces require a lot of work to maintain. Simplistically saying "we need faster development to take advantage of surges in interest" is pointless if there's nobody that's willing to stand behind the extra QC and support those patches introduce. Drive-by patching is a huge issue because the contributors rarely stick around to fix bugs.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    It seems to me they're saying Lemmy needs corporate backing to grow? Cause if they were so bothered by the opinions of the Lemmy devs they could simply use Kbin instead.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

    Well that or use an instance that isn't theirs, or doesn't even federate with theirs, or simply block theirs.🤔 I mean this is really throwing the baby out with the bath water.

    I have no strong love for leninists/stalinists, and think they accomplish little other than making actual socialists look bad while not being socialist themselves. But I'm not that put off by them. They're generally fairly intellectually weak, and easy to maneuver around. Should you choose to interact with them.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    They are talking about the people developing lemmy, not some petty fight with the admins of one specific instance.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    The Lemmy devs have no power over instances they do not run themselves.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Other than writing the software that all of those instances use to stay up to date and in contact with each other, regardless of their federation status.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    can't people just take the lemmy source code and make their own version of the lemmy api?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Sure, technically. But good luck getting anyone to use your version over the mass adopted one. And good luck fitting back in if they decide to take their fork in a direction you dont like, which isolates your instance further and further.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    It's because the current version has nothing wrong with it. If the Lemmy devs should choose to sabotage the Lemmy software, you'd be surprised how easily that happens when it pisses off all the instances and their owners. Instances will simply refuse to upgrade. And like most things, eventually some fork will win the race to become the dominant fork and the current Lemmy devs would be essentially disowned. Different forks also doesn't necessarily mean API breaking changes, so different forks would have no issue communicating (at least for a while).

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm not sure if this is what that person meant, but, usually it's on the original development team to handle outreach and building the identity of the software - in Lemmy's case, they have a bit of a not-great reputation... Even if they had the reach, that reputation hurts.

    Having Mozilla - or any top tier foss-friendly company - kinda take the reins a bit would probably be good.

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  • [+] 2 points 2 years ago* (6 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    via hardcoded checks

    Yah, I'm going to need a citation on that claim.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    Edit: Too many people are misunderstanding this post, so I'm removing its contents. To clarify: No checks exist in the current version of Lemmy - these were parts of previous versions.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    First: They did actually end up removing this and making it configurable, check the bottom of the page. In a vacuum, the idea to stop cut-and-clear racists and trolls from using Lemmy is not something that's too controversial. Sure, they are being hard asses about changing their mind and allowing instance owners to configure it themselves (and I'm glad they changed their mind). But there's a big overlap between passionate and opinionated people, so they have to be at times to ensure a project doesn't devolve into something they can't put your passion into anymore.

    Second: I mean... what do you expect? In the issue above they actively encourage people to make their own fork of Lemmy and run that if they don't like something from the base version of Lemmy, so I kind of would assume they do as they preach. Instance owners also have the option to block communities without defederation. Lemmy.ml is basically their home instance. If anything this is a reason not to make an account on lemmy.ml, but as long as that doesn't leak into the source code of Lemmy, who cares?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Where are or were those checks exactly in the Lemmy software code? Yeah.

    If they were on the lemmy.ml instance, it's in their right to do so. It's their instance. The basic codebase, which other instances are using, has nothing to do with it.

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