Mozilla.Social is Shutting Down

The Instance Closes December 17th

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.

Image Source: Mozilla

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.

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.

Image Source: Mozilla

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.

Sean Tilley

Sean Tilley has been a part of the federated social web for over 15+ years, starting with his experiences with Identi.ca back in 2008. Sean was involved with the Diaspora project as a Community Manager from 2011 to 2013, and helped the project move to a self-governed model. Since then, Sean has continued to study, discuss, and document the evolution of the space and the new platforms that have risen within it.

2 Comments

  1. @news@wedistribute.org Ah, well that’s disappointing. Back when this all started I thought they might make a lasting positive impact and help to lend more credibility to the fediverse. Of course, if it was going to wither anyway I suppose this is for the best.

    I just hope we see more web-centric organizations take a real interest in the fediverse. It seems like the obvious choice for moving the web forward, but we’re certainly facing some sticky obstacles.

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