lmorchard

The Firefox repo gets 100-300 changesets per day, up to 1000 commits per week. Around 100-150 contributors land those in any given week. That's activity comparable to Linux or Chromium. And, the release schedule is accelerating from a four-week cadence to a two-week cadence this fall.

Just because other efforts and initiatives are flasher or noisier doesn't mean Firefox isn't the main priority.

Yeah, this is a real thing: Mozilla doesn't have a team dedicated optimizing Gecko-based Firefox for iOS just in case it can be shipped someday. That Firefox can be built and will run on iOS doesn't mean it will immediately be a great browser there - there are some things you just don't know to optimize until you've gotten the thing into a lot of users' hands over a decent span of time.

> I'd say Mozilla should take the money they're spending on their current nonsense and spend it here instead.

Mozilla makes roughly $500m per year with maybe $1.5b in the bank. That's about 1-2 orders of magnitude short of what would be required to poke Apple in the eye and make them feel it.

Why lol? If you only want to scale to a few dozen or a few hundred or even a few thousand folks, a Mastodon instance is fine. You don't have to scale to the whole world.

Scaling is not useful if that's not your goal

I'm interested in ATProto, but honestly this kind of "cheeky" post just turns me off. These are different approaches to the problem, they don't have to be adversarial.

Another way to look at it: the Twitter-brained perspective is that it's a good thing to build a system where everyone has access to everyone else all of the time - that the global firehose is a primary goal.

That notion is not universally agreed upon as desirable. Some folks and groups of folks value membranes with varying degrees of permeability.

With Mastodon, each instance is a self-contained community server with the option to link up with peers of similar shape. That this arrangement makes a whole-world view difficult is seen as a feature-not-bug by many users.

Also, since each instance is a self-contained complete unit of microblogging-shaped community, that means a relatively small technical team can host & maintain that unit for a decent-sized group of folks with relatively cheap cost.

Put a bunch of those together in federation, and you have a chance at a pretty well-distributed spread of moderators and caretakers. Depending on how any particular instance's funding and governance is setup, that can also result in members being more or less involved in the running of the place. (Which, also, is why some folks value being "belonging" to a particular instance.)

In ATProto, the "instance" is the complete stack you'd need to have ownership over the whole shebang. Some folks and communities value that. Versus Mastodon, Bluesky is just a much much bigger box.

You can also separate Mastodon from ActivityPub. You can make new apps atop ActivityPub - and folks are. Photos, videos, calendars, etc. It's based on JSON Linked Data, and that's expandable to other types of activities and data. If you really wanted to, you could make a great big all-encompassing app UX that handles everything. But, I guess no one's found that interesting enough for it to take off yet.

And then once you've self-hosted ever component in the stack, you have one (1) Mastodon instance equivalent :)

Meanwhile, Undertale, one of the most celebrated video games, famously has a 1000+ line switch statement and AI had nothing to do with it. Sometimes you have to bang out something that works, just to even get the chance to be annoyed at how bad it is for next version.

No, but it's increasingly penalizing folks for focusing on well-crafted code on company time.

My comments are often more off-the-cuff than my blog posts—I spend more time editing the posts, usually

As I'm asking folks what bits they think are LLM imprints, they keep showing me bits that I originally wrote. It's really weird.

I mean, the irony is that those sentences were in my original draft before running it past the LLM

> The web was objectively awful as a technology

I, for one, remember when I could crash Netscape Navigator by using CSS too hard (i.e. at all) or trying to make a thing move 10px with DHTML. But I kept trying to make browser to thing.

I guess I have a grating LLM-voice, then, because I don't think it sounds particularly different than how I've written other posts.

Which bits? And don't say the em-dashes because I've been over-using them since high school