this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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270 active users isn’t much for a masto instance.
Given that Mozilla is a small company, and small company’s really can’t afford to lose focus for the major roadmap initiatives, I’m going to bet that this was someone’s hackathon project.
Mozilla is so small it only pays its CEO 10 million a year.
How do they even afford to eat???
Probably the $500 million or so that Google pays them every year
They probably shop at Aldi.
I don’t think Mozilla running a Mastodon server is losing focus. The ethos of Mozilla and the Fediverse have a lot of overlap, and Mozilla should desire to have a foot in it.
An official Mastodon server is also a useful platform for marketing and outreach. In contrast an organisation claiming to be all about privacy and open source retreating from a social media platform that embodies those is not a good look.
That's the thing that changed.
I'm surprised that people consider a ~2000-person company that revenues about a half billion a year to be "small". Mozilla is a profit-driven corporation, far separated from the vision of the hobbyist coders who founded it decades ago. The only reason they're shutting down their Mastodon server is because it's not making them money, not because they lack the resources to support it.
This take is silly. Spinning up a mastodon instance would have never made them money at any point. If it was all about money, the instance would never have been made to begin with.
They have about 750 employees.
(According to Wikipedia)
Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the for-profit) are two different entities under the Mozilla umbrella, so their staffing may be reported differently depending where you look and how they're counting it.
The foundation is about 80 folks on payroll, although OSS projects have about 1000 contributors popping in and out.
There is also the “MZLA Technologies” subsidiary, which I think has some dedicated headcount under it as well. Although, there isn’t a lot of public info about that company.
isn't that where ThunderBird is?
Still, 750 is totally not a small company, also they manage and host matrix/element, that are way more edgy in terms of technology, takes a LOT of time only for maintenance if you have bigs rooms :
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix
Choices are not neutrals and I don't know what I would do at their seats, but I think it's a bit sad that mozilla invest more into matrix/element instead political opinion makers like these social network xitter alternatives, fediverse & all <3
Maybe I don't know shit and maybe Mastodon is also a heavy mess to selfhost !
Maybe I should’ve said “midsize.”
My point is that they’re not a company with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. And, as someone that usually likes to work at companies that are about size, you can run out of engineers pretty quickly if you’re not focused and or working on stuff that is wickedly complex. And Mozilla is definitely doing the latter.
i think their matrix server is hosted by element
I think official instances should be fairly small, no? They shouldn’t allow users from outside Mozilla onto their instance. The point is that they federate and can interact with a wider audience from an official source.
Yeah, I believe the official instance of EU and ACM are both quite small. It is a great way to verify people's identity just from their ID.
But muh free service!
I'm sad it's gone but I'm not gonna pretend like it's the end of the world.