A Plan for Social Media - Intro
About 18 months ago, Mozilla announced that they would explore a healthy social media alternative. Their started their efforts by setting up a server and putting up together a team to work on new applications for the ecossytem. Fast-forward to February of 2024, and they released a memo which said:
Our initial approach was based on a belief that Mozilla needed to quickly reach large scale in order to effectively shape the future of social media. It was a noble idea but one we struggled to execute. While we resourced mozilla.social heavily to pursue this ambitious idea, in retrospect a more modest approach would have enabled us to participate in the space with considerably greater agility.
The more cynical of you would be quick to argue that this memo is mostly corporate talk to justify their poor management decisions of the last years and to give them an excuse to jump into the AI bandwagon.
It seems that no matter how badly the tech companies screw up and no matter how many people show complete dissatisfaction with the status quo, the Fediverse as a whole keeps “struggling to execute”. Does this mean that Mozilla is right to just get out of the space altogether? Should we just give up on the idea of a healthier social media landscape? In this blog post, I’d like to make a deeper analysis of the core pieces of the Fediverse and:
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