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 (https://mozilla.social/settings/export), and migrate your account to another instance following these instructions (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozilla-social-faq).
The majority of those are nothing burgers. They shut down their dedicated password app when they integrated it’s features into the browser, they shut down their encrypted file sharing tool when they realized it was being used for very nefarious uses, they shut down Positron and it’s affiliated projects because nobody started using it over Electron… and a lot of the rest are extremely niche (like viewing websites in 3d, cool but not all that useful).
“It’s” follows the rule for contractions with words ending in “s” (is, has) as well as the apostrophe-s rule for possessive forms. As you have demonstrated, the distinction is obvious in context; there is no significant opportunity for confusion.
Keeping the old form does nothing for society other than to inflate the egos of authoritarian English teachers, provide an opportunity for pedantry, confuse spell checkers, and introduce an unneeded exception to the possessive form. Nothing of value is lost by eliminating the old word.
So, “It’s” is a homonym: two words spelled and pronounced the same, but carrying different meanings.
Was it even a goal? Mastodon can be used for internal communication, e.g. https://social.kernel.org is only for linux developers, and I know a local university where they have a defederated mastodon instance where every student automatically got registered.
If they just needed it for posting news maybe simply having a profile on one of the big instances would be enough. I see they had only 270 users.
The majority of those are nothing burgers. They shut down their dedicated password app when they integrated it’s features into the browser, they shut down their encrypted file sharing tool when they realized it was being used for very nefarious uses, they shut down Positron and it’s affiliated projects because nobody started using it over Electron… and a lot of the rest are extremely niche (like viewing websites in 3d, cool but not all that useful).
*its features, its affiiated projects
“Its” has been deprecated.
“It’s” follows the rule for contractions with words ending in “s” (is, has) as well as the apostrophe-s rule for possessive forms. As you have demonstrated, the distinction is obvious in context; there is no significant opportunity for confusion.
Keeping the old form does nothing for society other than to inflate the egos of authoritarian English teachers, provide an opportunity for pedantry, confuse spell checkers, and introduce an unneeded exception to the possessive form. Nothing of value is lost by eliminating the old word.
So, “It’s” is a homonym: two words spelled and pronounced the same, but carrying different meanings.
The same now with mozilla.social. nobody is using it
Was it even a goal? Mastodon can be used for internal communication, e.g. https://social.kernel.org is only for linux developers, and I know a local university where they have a defederated mastodon instance where every student automatically got registered.
If they just needed it for posting news maybe simply having a profile on one of the big instances would be enough. I see they had only 270 users.