fidzu : mozilla

In this month's Community Office Hours, we're chatting with our director Ryan Sipes. This talk opens with a brief history of Thunderbird and ends on our plans for its future. In between, we explain more about MZLA and its structure, and how this compares to the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation. We'll also cover the new Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail announcement And we talk about how Thunderbird put the fun in fundraising!

And if you'd like to know even more about Pro, next month we'll be chatting with Services Software Engineer Chris Aquino about our upcoming products. Chris, who most recently has been working on Assist, is both incredibly knowledgeable and a great person to chat with. We think you'll enjoythe upcoming Community Office Hours as much as we do.

April Office Hours: Thunderbird and MZLA

The beginning is always a very good place to start. We always love hearing Ryan recount Thunderbird's history, and we hope you do as well. As one of the key figures in bringing Thunderbird back from the ashes, Ryan is ideal to discuss how Thunderbird landed at MZLA, its new home since 2020. We also appreciate his perspective on our relationship to (and how we differ from) the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation. And as Thunderbird's community governance model is both one of its biggest strengths and a significant part of its comeback, Ryan has some valuable insights on our working relationship.

Thunderbird's future, however, is just as exciting a story as how we got here. Ryan gives us a unique look into some of our recent moves, from the decision to develop mobile apps to the recent move into our own email service, Thundermail, and the Thunderbird Pro suite of productivity apps. From barely surviving, we're glad to see all the ways in which Thunderbird and its community are thriving.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

The entire interview with Ryan is below, on YouTube and Peertube. There's a lot of references in the interview, which we've handily provided below. We hope you're enjoying these looks into what we're doing at Thunderbird as much as we're enjoying making them, and we'll see you next month!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Resources

• The untold history of Thunderbird: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/11/the-untold-history-of-thunderbird/
• The Mozilla Foundation: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Foundation
• Thunderbird's New Home at MZLA: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
• Community Office Hours with the Thunderbird Council: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/09/video-learn-about-the-thunderbird-council/
• The Mozilla Manifesto: https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/
• Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Announcement: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/04/thundermail-and-thunderbird-pro-services/
• Get Involved: https://www.thunderbird.net/participate/

The post VIDEO: Talking MZLA with Ryan Sipes appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

20 May 2025 1:05pm GMT

Hi folks,

I'm so excited to share that Flavius Floare joined our team recently as a Technical Writer. He's working alongside with Dayani to handle the Knowledge Base articles. Here's a bit more from Flavius himself:

Hi, everyone. My name is Flavius, and I'm joining the SUMO team as the new Technical Writer. I'm really excited to be here and look forward to collaborating with you. My goal is to be as helpful as possible, so feel free to reach out to me with suggestions or feedback.

Please join me to welcome Flavius into the team. He will also join our community call this week, so please make sure to join us tomorrow to say hi to him!

20 May 2025 8:22am GMT

Time for some horseshoe theory. Right-wing surveillance oligarchy has looped all the way back around to left-wing central economic planning.

Cory Doctorow sums up some recent news from Meta, in Pluralistic: Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again). Zuck has finally described how he's going to turn AI's terrible economics around: he's going to ask AI to design his advertisers' campaigns, and these will be so devastatingly effective that advertisers will pay a huge premium to advertise on Meta.

Or, as Nilay Patel at The Verge put it, Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industry. What Mark is describing here is a vision where a client comes to Meta and says I want customers for my product, and Meta does everything else. It generates photos and videos of those products using AI, writes copy about those products with AI, assembles that into an infinite number of ads with AI, targets those ads to all the people on its platforms with AI, measures which ads perform best and iterates on them with AI, and then has those customers buy the actual products on its platforms using its systems.

But the mind-control ray story, if true, would affect more companies, and functions within companies, than just advertising. Myles Younger writes, Zuck Says AI Will Make Advertising So Good Its Share of GDP Will Grow. Is That Really Possible? In the Meta version of the future, somehow the advertising share of the economy grows to include media, sales, and customer service. And a business that wants to sell a product or service would be able to change the number of units sold with one setting-the amount of money sent to Meta. That means the marketing department within the business can also be dramatically reduced. Or do you even need a marketing department when the one decision it has to make is how much money to send to Meta to move how many units? That could be handled as part of some other job.

TheZvi, in Zuckerberg's Dystopian AI Vision, writes,

When asked what he wants to use AI for, Zuckerberg's primary answer is advertising, in particular an ultimate black box where you ask for a business outcome and the AI does what it takes to make that outcome happen. I leave all the do not want and misalignment maximalist goal out of what you are literally calling a black box, film at 11 if you need to watch it again and general dystopian nightmare details as an exercise to the reader.

Such rightsizing, much futuristic! But wait a minute, this has been done. Centrally planned economies are already a thing, and have had well-known challenges for a while. On paper, the central planers decide up front how much of each product or service will be produced and consumed, but in reality the system ends up with everyone faking their numbers and gaming the system. For surveillance capitalism, that's already happening. A majority of US teens have lost trust in Big Tech, and advertisers are starting to walk away from platforms' AI solutions that once promised them everything. The top-down AI-driven social media story is less of a nightmare and more just more slop.

Related

Antitrust Policy for the Conservative by FTC Commissioner Mark R. Meador. (This is basically a good memo but is not going to have much impact in a political environment where a powerful monopoly can avoid government action by showing up at Mar-A-Lago to invest in a memecoin or settle a lawsuit. If we get to the point where there is a reasonably powerful honest conservative movement in the USA, then Meador's work will be useful, probably with not too many updates.)

Bonus links

Even a Broken Clock Can Lower Drug Prices by Joan Westenberg. The CBO has repeatedly found that negotiated drug pricing-including international benchmarking-can save significant amounts of public money.

Crypto Is Still for Criming by Paul Krugman. (Will cryptocurrencies go mainstream, or will they be stuck as just a crime thing? Turns out the answer is both because crime is going mainstream.)

The AI Slop Presidency by Matthew Gault. (This kind of thing is a good reason to avoid generative AI header images in blog posts. The AI look has become the signature style of the pro-oligarch, pro-surveillance side. This is particularly obvious on LinkedIn. An AI-look image tends to mean a growth hacking or pro-Big Tech post, while pro-human-rights or pro-decentralization posters tend to use original graphics or stock photos.)

Monopoly Round-Up: China Is Not Why America Is Sputtering by Matt Stoller. Simply put, modern American law is oriented towards ensuring very high returns on capital to benefit Wall Street and hinder the ability to make things. (fwiw, surveillance capitalism is probably part of the problem too. Creepy negative-sum games to move more units of existing products have higher and more predictable ROI than product innovation does.)

Industry groups are not happy about the imminent demise of Energy Star by Marianne Lavelle The nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy has estimated that the Energy Star program costs the government about $32 million per year, while saving families more than $40 billion in annual energy costs.

The Mozilla Firefox New Terms of Use Disaster: What Actually Happened? by Youssuff Quips. It is clear is that Mozilla wants to be able to unambiguously claim to regulators that people agreed to have their data sold - they want that permission to be persistent, and they want it to be modifiable in perpetuity. That changes what Firefox has been, and the Firefox I loved is gone. (For what it's worth I don't think it's as bad as all that. In a seemingly never-ending quest to get extra income that's not tied to the Google search deal, Mozilla management has done a variety of stupid shit but they always learn from it and move on. They'll drop their risky adfraud in the browser thing too at some point. More: why privacy-enhancing advertising technologies failed)

18 May 2025 12:00am GMT