"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… "
We desperately need a company like Mozilla to take the reigns of something like Lemmy. The original developers are far too biased and short sighted to see the bigger picture, it needs to be an independent group that promotes more open source development.
Yeah I’ve considered leaving Lemmy because of who is in charge of development right now. They were not ready for its sudden burst in popularity and are not handling it well.
Time for a repo fork?
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.
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.
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.
They are talking about the people developing lemmy, not some petty fight with the admins of one specific instance.
The Lemmy devs have no power over instances they do not run themselves.
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.
can’t people just take the lemmy source code and make their own version of the lemmy api?
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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I like Mozilla, I respect their mission and their good nature. I can’t help but feel the billions they receive from Google make it too easy for them to be, at best, unfocused and, at worst, lazy. They offer a lot of random services like this. I fear this play is just chasing another possible mediocre revenue generator for them. Like pocket, like Mozilla vpn and private relay, etc.
Maintaining a web browser is an intensely cost and time prohibitive endeavor, especially nowadays. The FOSS community can maintain a lot of things but the sheer scale of Firefox, the need for expertise, the necessary labor, it just can’t be done by volunteers and donations, at least not without using Chromium. They have to get a cash infusion from somewhere.
I don’t like it anymore than you do but ultimately the issue isn’t Mozilla, it’s the state of the technology market. Silicon Valley is no place for a non-profit organization right now, no matter how much we need it.
What we need is regulations and anti-trust, but even that may not truly save us.
They need money. That’s it. That’s the long and short of it.
What’s stopping web standards from being made simple or unchanging enough for a smaller project to maintain a functional web browser?
At this point the web is about as complex as an operating system in terms of complexity. That needs really strong specific standards in order for it to work, and in turn projects like web browsers are huge and complex.
If someone wanted to build a web browser that only followed the simpler parts of the specifications, it wouldn’t work for many websites* and people would not use that browser.
*Whether or not sites need to be so complex is another question entirely, but the reality right now is that they are
Occasionally when I do web stuff I look into the big frameworks but quickly get overwhelmed and go back to simple html/css/js, so yeah I kind of just don’t get what the point is or why anyone needs or wants complexity there. Large websites always do most stuff serverside anyway it seems, so where is this complexity even getting used? It is very mysterious to me. Suspect Google etc. are pushing stuff no one needs in this regard as well to move the web towards something only they can handle.
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It’s always amusing when someone say fediverse is good for the users, when fediverse gives zero right to the users. Pretty much every service in it is made with giving 100% of control to the admin. Admin can suspend and take down anything and any account without notice or explanation and user has no way of asking for an appeal. I mean yes. Fediverse is nice. I even run my own mastodon and Pixelfed instances. But please, let’s not fool ourselves. About Mozilla, they’re just being what they’ve been in recent years. Hypocrites. The company that claims to care about privacy, but implement privacy invasive settings and services (pocket) by default. And now they just want to create a platform focused on censorship. Thats why they’re interested in fediverse.
