November 6, 2023 archive

5:18 am

When I climb up into the crow’s nest and look out at the horizon, one of the “lands of opportunity” I continually see is the world of “decentralized social media”, and in particular Mastodon and the other services that use the ActivityPub protocol and are broadly referred to as the “Fediverse”.

For context, I first joined Mastodon back in 2016 when Twitter was going through one of its various crises. You can still find me there today, primarily at danyork@mastodon.social but also with accounts on a couple of other servers.

Part of what I value about the Fediverse is that you are not at the mercy of the whims of billionaires (ex Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg) or large “platforms” and corporations (ex Google). You are in control.

In fact, you can be completely in control if you want to operate your own server. And if you don’t want to take that on, you can choose from many different servers – and you can easily move between servers should you wish to do so.

And when the big #TwitterMigration started about a year ago after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and started making many changes, many others started flowing over here to Mastodon and the many other services that make up the Fediverse.

But it hasn’t all been “a bed of roses” as we might say here in the USA. Many people found the Fediverse confusing and not welcoming. Many were looking for the centralized, simple service like Twitter. (Hence the current interest in Threads and BlueSky, which deliver a centralized experience.) Erin Kissane wrote an excellent critique at: Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’t.

Which brings me to Mozilla.

As noted in this TechCrunch article – “Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future” – Mozilla is seeking to see how they can help. This is not new “news” … they announced back in December 2022 that they were going to be joining the Fediverse. And those of us watching have seen the emergence of “Mozilla.social” in May, and we also saw the job ads and more.

What intrigues me is that Mozilla is very mission-based, and has the ability to proceed slowly and thoughtfully to “do things right”. They aren’t pressured to hit quarterly advertising sales targets, etc.

The article, based on an interview with Mozilla’s Carolyn O’Hara, states:

the company is aiming to tackle some of the obstacles that have prevented users from joining and participating in the fediverse so far, including the technical hurdles around onboarding, finding people to follow and discovering interesting content to discuss.

And those ARE some of the major challenges!

They mention creating a “Discover” feed to help people find interesting things. Intriguingly, they mention working with publishers to see if more of them can start publishing in Mastodon and the Fediverse.

This, to me, has been one of the things lacking in the Fediverse. There certainly are a number of publishers and media sites… but they are so far just a small fraction of the number of media that used to be – and in many cases still are – on Twitter.

Anything Mozilla can do to help bring more of that kind of news content will be welcome! That is so much of what some of us look for in addition to the conversations and connections.

To that end, I’m also intrigued by what they talk about for enabling the creation of smaller communities – and in general in encouraging a place for civil discourse.

We’ll see! I’ve joined the waitlist, and you can, too.

On a related note, as I briefly mentioned in an example in yesterday’s message, I read a fascinating “post-mortem” analysis of what happened with the Pebble social network that launched as a Twitter competitor and then ultimately had to shut down. It’s very interesting and I strongly encourage anyone interested in these kind of services to give it a read.

The interesting part is that some members of the the community that developed on Pebble are now exploring coming together on a Mastodon instance, pebble.social.

This is another example of the power of decentralized social networks – you are in control. And if you want to set up a new server to bring together a community… you have the power to do so!

Thanks for reading to the end. I would welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

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Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.