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.
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.
The ethos of Mozilla
That’s the thing that changed.
I think this kind of a good thing.
Those of us with long enough memories will remember a long tail of Mozilla building stuff and abandoning them, quite like Google.
The two that genuinely hurt me were:
- Firefox OS - honestly great. I still have my Firefox OS phone sitting around in a box somewhere.
- Mozilla Persona - an authentication service, was great and still better than the existing alternatives
But the reason I think this it is a good thing, is that they’re focusing on their core product. For me Firefox is superior in many ways to Chrome, Ad blocking is an immediate example of that. They need to keep Firefox being successful.
Another reason I think this is a good thing is that there must be new people coming to Mozilla and Firefox who don’t know the history. And it’s great that there are new people like that.
