Earlier this week, the Mozilla.social instance sent messages to members regarding closure of the service.

We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024.

Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta.

You can continue to use Mozilla.social until December 17. Before that date, you can download your data here and migrate your account to another instance following these instructions. 

For any questions, please review this FAQ.

Sincerely,

Mozilla.social team

The service was invite-only and in beta status, and launched to great fanfare in December 2022. It operated on a fork of Mastodon that used Elk as a cleaner, more user-friendly frontend, and acted as a community hub. With services such as Pocket already under the Mozilla umbrella, it wasn’t hard to imagine how the instance could become a conduit for discovery across the Social Web.

How Did We Get Here?

Mozilla’s Fediverse offering had a series of big challenges from the very beginning. While the organization has done terrific work in developing an open source browser, mail client, and rendering engine, operating a social network is a very different ball game.

Building a software platform is one thing, but acting as a network operator requires a dedication of stewardship: moderation, community management, and Trust & Safety all play an important role in creating a persistent online community. While there were elements of this in the early days of the project, Mozilla ultimately ended up cutting corners when it came to moderation and community-building.

We’re Hosting Our Own Fediverse Instance. Here’s Why. – We Distribute

Sometimes, you have to do the hosting and community management part yourself.

Trouble Brewing

One of the biggest contributing factors to the project involved a change in leadership at an executive level. As Laura Chambers stepped in as CEO for The Mozilla Corporation, the organization began to emphasize a new set of priorities, the most important of which being Artificial Intelligence.

Shortly after the transition in leadership, 60 people working on Mozilla Social were laid off. This included designers, product managers, developers, and community advocates hoping to make a meaningful impact on the project. Over time, the instance pivoted to a vanilla Mastodon installation, shedding the custom frontend that made it unique. The remaining team was effectively reduced to a skeleton crew.

The writing on the wall could be seen from the discontinuation of other Mozilla projects, such as VR platform Mozilla Hubs. Despite a long period of development and a suite of pioneering technologies, the project was shuttered earlier this year.

What Now?

It’s a surprise that Mozilla Social has managed to stay afloat for this long. Users will need to migrate to another Fediverse instance prior to the shutdown date of December 17th this year, in order to preserve their social connections.

As the service shuts down, we’re left to wonder about the long-term sustainability of other Fediverse instances, such as the ones operated by Vivaldi, Medium, Flipboard, and the BBC.

Many non-corporate instances are effectively run out-of-pocket by volunteers, donating their time and free labor to keep their nodes of the network in operation. Some instances are able to keep going thanks to user donations or cooperative model funding, but it remains a pain point for many in the network.