My original claim was that, in addition to gedaliyah’s points, the TOS gives them permission to perform basic browser tasks. My last comment was about the same thing. The TOS is relevant because 1) it’s the basis of this entire discussion and 2) the changes in the TOS conclusively prove my original claim.

As to “data collection” in this context, those words do not appear in the TOS and are not rights Mozilla is asserting for use of their software. It’s a fiction you invented. That was the point of me pointing out the use of the word “use” – describing that term and distinguishing its meaning from the thing you made up.

Maximum wrongness on your part.

This is the original text that everyone flipped out about (OP: “WHY DO YOU NEED MY DATA TO MAKE FIREFOX WORK???”):

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

It has since been changed to:

You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

Use. When you input a url, that information is used to resolve an IP then fetch a webpage. You’re granting a right to complete tasks you assign using information you input. They have permission to send your post content to a server, but they don’t own that content. This should be very obvious in the revised text.

Wasn’t the Twitter “bridge” just bot accounts though? It’s a bit different with Bluesky because they’ve said that they completely support bridges between AT and AP but just don’t have the resources to work on them themselves. Anyway, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou gave an interview yesterday where he included Bluesky as part of the Fediverse because of the bridge.

Personally, I consider them to be both part of and not part of the Fediverse, I guess. I wouldn’t send someone there and I also kind of think they’re a bunch of dicks for re-inventing the wheel instead of contributing improvements here.

I think that ATP and nostr are sometimes included as part of the Fediverse because they both have bridges that allow connection. Without the bridges they’re isolated.

Even writing a post, you’re entering data through Firefox into the post box. We just don’t consider that data. It would be pretty quiet around here if you couldn’t do that…

new users haven’t been checking it out as much – a month ago this was driven by external events (mostly Zuck turning pro-Trump, I think.)

A lot of users came over from TikTok too. There was a more organized TikTok campaign to get people to move to Pixelfed. Plus the ban and removal from stores gave people a bigger push to move.

Thanks!

I just got it on the dl instead

Anyone have a link that works for Canadians, you MONSTERS?

Yes:

One, its terms of service ban content that “is violent or threatening or promotes violence or actions that are threatening to any other person.” Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan committed to us that Ghost’s hosted service will remove pro-Nazi content, full stop. If nothing else, that’s further than Substack will go, and makes Ghost a better intermediate home for Platformer than our current one.

I don’t think we’re completely saved forever but they tried making podcasts Spotify-exclusive. I remember a bunch of Gimlet podcast hosts being like “please come to Spotify to listen to us – it’s better than it used to be!” They ended up caving because people didn’t listen. Podcasting is built around RSS – even though people aren’t really aware of it – and people expect to get them this way.

RSS is the hero that saved us from Spotify (et at.) walling off podcasts behind their paywall.

Google weirdly gets a lot of credit for killing things that are very much alive and well.

Yes.

For example, if you search for the old fediversenews url, you can subscribe to it: https://venera.social/profile/fediversenews/

Yep, I follow a couple Lemmy communities from Friendica.

Amazing! Keep stepping on rakes, Reddit.

They’re really doing this right:

As explained above, the team started out with a shared view that Quote Posts can be misused. Many people simply do not want their content to be reframed by others; or they may find that if it is reposted, they receive unwelcome attention.

In order to mitigate these issues, we plan to include several features in our implementation:

You will be able to choose whether your posts can be quoted at all.
You will be notified when someone quotes you.
You will be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context at any time.

We also want to build a tight integration for Quote Posts with the reporting functionality, to help people to feel more safe.

Yes. And the statute of limitations is a year into the next admin. This agreement is them acknowledging that they’re breaking the law.

https://archive.is/vSHSC

So far so good! Some very unscientific observations from spending an absurd amount of time scrolling local on pixelfed.social:

The people coming from Instagram and TikTok seem way less grumpy than the microbloggers. People are having a lot of fun and not complaining about much. It’s kind of a trip seeing happy, joyful people on the Fediverse to be honest. Everything in the world suuuuuuuucks right now, so it’s felt like a bit of a refuge. Sometimes I’ll accidentally bounce over to the global feed and oh man is the change in tone jarring.

People don’t seem to have a problem with servers like the Twitter migrants did. Folks are still talking about it a lot on Mastodon though. I’ve literally not seen a single post about Pixelfed being “too complicated” to succeed, whereas it was (and is) pretty common to see “this place is great and all, but…” posts in the microblogging neighbourhood. Not sure why this is but it might be because the people coming to Pixelfed are generally younger than Mastodon users. This is just a guess, but I’d estimate the average age of Mastodon users is maybe mid-40s. Most of the people pouring into Pixelfed appear to be in their mid-to-late-20s. Perhaps those folks are just more accustomed to servers through Discord and gaming? Though people are generally captioning photos and not writing out lists of things they’re unhappy about and they could also just be unaware of servers altogether…

Pixelfed is easily the most diverse “corner” of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren’t. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.

I’ve seen a bunch of people on Instagram promoting Feb 1st as “Global Switch Day” so hopefully it’ll keep blowing up.