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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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?
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.
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 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.