I’m happy to see Mozilla narrowing its focus to making just a damn browser

but thats not what theyre doing. im on mobile so dont have the link handy, but they mention in a different article that they think Pocket has been superseded by AI and tab groups. theyve harvested the bits of it they want and have no use for the consumer service now but its not about narrowing their focus.

They promised to open source it 7 years ago when they bought it and now they’re snatching it out from under users and shutting it down. Mozilla is getting better and better at emulating its Silicon Valley idols

Self hosting isn’t really compatible with viral content

The post I was replying to claimed virality and self hosting are at odds with one another because it causes skyrocketing expense. My point was that maybe someone selfhosting a server in the fediverse is not as interested in virality. And I doubt even the most viral posts in the fediverse would break the bank of a selfhoster

Virality is nowhere near the only reason for posting videos. People post them to make jokes, teach something, reply to someone else, etc, or all the same reasons someone might make a blogpost or a post on a link aggregator.

Theres no web app? That seems short sighted. You apparently cant access anything without logging either. I dont expect these shorts to get much viewership if you have to register and download an app to see anything. It also doesnt seem in the spirit of the fediverse

Maybe the problem in that equation is the expectation of virality and not self hosting?

That’s not a contradiction, it’s maybe an incomplete argument. And I was relying on my previous sentence that mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations to imply that they would do it again and were already warning about that. But none of this even matters; I’ve made a follow up comment that lays it out more explicitly.

I didn’t cherry pick a statement. I included the part where they said the very first draft.

I did fail to explain how its a power grab, but that’s was only because I thought it was a fairly obvious one-to-one point. I’ve also added another example. But lemme try again.

1. Mastodon has a history of pushing features that affect interop with other implementations without seeking feedback from other implementations or outright ignoring the feedback they do receive.
2. A member of the mastodon team wrote a FEP to formalize a setting related to search indexing. This was the right way to go about it. yey Mastodon was working with other implementations. But that FEP didn’t receive positive feedback and it seems like it was abandoned.
3. Now mastodon is trying to standardize something using the ideas from that FEP, outside of the FEP process (which is the agreed upon way to collaborate between implementers).
4. They’re warning on their site that they have deadlines and may not incorporate feedback if they can’t resolve it without breaking deadlines.
5. They are under no obligation to incorporate it after their initial draft and, historically, mastodon is unwilling to update their work to incorporate other implementers’ feedback.

A more collaborative way to do this would have been to seek feedback before making a grant proposal and making the grant proposal jointly with other projects so they weren’t the only ones getting paid for it.

Mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations.

This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish

The site even warns that theyre on a deadline and may not incorporate feedback.

EDIT: they also mention a “setting” that determines if a user/post is searchable. theyve presented a FEP to formalize this setting but nearly everyone else had issues with their proposal. as usual for mastodon, this looks like them sidestepping external feedback and just doing what they want

chat apps and systems like Twitter and Mastodon aren’t a good place for journalism

Super agree with that. Framing this feature as specific to journalism was a poor choice. The feature is useful for any writer/blogger/joe schmoe on the web

It’s a cool feature, but it sucks that (once again) the mastodon team is taking control of fediverse-wide features and ignoring outside criticism.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30398

on-demand pods that travel on existing abandoned railways.

They’re reusing existing tracks.

What legislation like this would do is essentially let the biggest players pull the ladders up behind them

But you’re claiming that there’s already no ladder. Your previous paragraph was about how nobody but the big players can actually start from scratch.

All this aside from the conceptual flaws of such legislation. You’d be effectively outlawing people from analyzing data that’s publicly available

How? This is a copyright suit. Like I said in my last comment, the gathering of the data isn’t in contention. That’s still perfectly legal and anyone can do it. The suit is about the use of that data in a paid product.

I’m not familiar with the exact amount of resources, but I know it takes a lot. My point was about what specifically is in contention here.

Also, you were the one pointing out that this case could entrench “giant fucking corporations” in the space. But if they’re the only ones who can afford the resources to train them, then this case won’t have an effect on that entrenchment

Harvesting the dataset isn’t the problem. Using copyrighted work in a paid product is the problem. Individuals could still train their own models for personal use

There’s no way Mozilla is replacing Google as the default, so what are they actually announcing here? I didn’t read any actual results thats happening. Are they just adding Qwant as an option in the search engine settings?