Mozilla Festival; Social Moment
Kick off Saturday night at MozFest with an easy-going evening of music, good vibes, and time to mix with fellow festival-goers.
Headliner: B Jones
Fresh off DJ Mag’s Top 100 (#94), B Jones made history as the first Spanish artist to play Tomorrowland’s Main Stage, across three editions since 2022. With releases on Tomorrowland Music, Spinnin’, and Dim Mak—plus collabs with Steve Aoki, Alok and NERVO—she’s bringing big-festival energy to our dancefloor.
Opening set: DJ Sarah Sadaka
Human-rights technologist and DJ based in Brooklyn, New York, Sarah sets the tone with a genre-hopping, feel-good opener.
Good to know
Join us from 19:30. Bars and food trucks will be open all night to purchase food and beverages!
See you on the floor! 💃🕺
Alexander Zimmerman; Booth
We’re excited to invite you to explore our Alternative Platforms Showcase at Mozilla Festival 2025 on the opening day, Friday Nov 7th.
For the very first time at Mozilla Festival, we are offering this dynamic, hands-on exhibition space where builders and technologists can connect, demo, and inspire.
This year’s MozFest theme - Unlearning - calls on developers, engineers, designers, artists, and innovators of all kinds to challenge our inherited digital systems, and share bold new visions for openness, equity, and human impact.
The Showcase - located in Zone E, the Social Hub - will feature 6 tools/platforms that challenge the current status quo, and are examples of the kind of alternative tech we want to cultivate in our world.
Come check out:
Decidim
Rayhunter (EFF) (Join us at EFF’s booth from 4pm for a session where Rayhunter’s lead technologist Cooper Quintin will tell you about the technical details behind Rayhunter)
Tessa Brown, Tony Haile, Jad Esber, Mohamed Nanabhay; Talk
In this panel, companies from Mozilla Ventures “Healthy Communities” thesis areas reflect on lessons learned in building social tooling around data sovereignty and trust and safety. Mozilla Ventures’ General Partner Mohamed Nanabhay moderates a conversation between Koodos’s Jad Esber, Germ Network’s Tessa Brown, and Filament’s Tony Haile on building consumer-first products that balance data sovereignty, community, and public trust.
Claire Pershan; Forum
The EU has been quietly negotiating a proposed law that would force messaging services to scan private chats and risk breaking end-to-end encryption.
Privacy defenders and activists have been successful in preventing the worst, at least for now, but EU countries are still pushing the issue forward.
This urgent file has not gotten the attention it deserves, in particular outside of Europe.
That's why we'll hold space for informal discussion with privacy experts and media representatives about the EU "'Chat Control" file and how it risks weakening encryption.
We will take advantage of the international journalists present at the festival to raise awareness about this concerning regulatory proposal in the EU that could have global implications.
We will discuss the technical challenges in this file, the state of play, and how we can advocate and organize together.
Katya Hancock, Josh Thompson; Talk
Too often, tech products aimed at young people are designed for them, not with them, reinforcing narrow assumptions about what young people want, need, and can contribute. As a result, digital spaces frequently work against, rather than for, young people’s wellbeing. But not all young people are struggling with tech. Many are finding ways to connect, create, and express themselves, often in spite of default design choices that fail to reflect their realities.
This matters now more than ever. Gen Z and Gen Alpha make up one of the largest and most powerful blocks of tech users globally. They are not only shaping online culture, they are influencing the evolution of the platforms themselves. And with the rapid rise of AI, we face a critical window to shape how this transformative technology impacts a rising generation. Young people must be supported to navigate both the opportunities and risks of AI, and to develop the agency, fluency, and voice to help shape its future.
This session will explore how default design practices continue to marginalize youth perspectives, and why centering diverse youth voices is essential to building more inclusive, empowering tech. It’s more than just about gaining the technical skills to build new tech, it’s also about developing a critical fluency of how tech intersects into a teen’s life. Our goal is not only to manage and minimize risks, but also to lean into the positives: supporting young people in shaping digital spaces, and AI tools, that foster meaningful connection, creativity, and agency, and helping them find their way in a tech future they help design.
We’ll share insights from Young Futures’ Youth Listening Tour and from youth-led and youth-informed nonprofits that are charting new paths for healthier, more empowering digital experiences. We’ll also explore what it takes to move from tokenistic “youth input” to true youth co-creation, and how funding and scaling youth-developed solutions can shift the broader ecosystem.
Trei Brundrett, Sam Liebeskind; Forum
How local communities share information and build trust is essential to pluralism, democracy, and economic mobility. And while we see important mediums like newspapers and libraries dying, online forums like Facebook Groups and Nextdoor have stepped in to fill the void. In fact, half of US adults say they get their local news from these sources, even more than newspapers. Unfortunately, many of these groups are toxic, negative, and hard to navigate.
Here at New_ Public, we have done a lot of research in the last year about what it requires to support healthy digital spaces for local communities; and it turns out that thoughtful, skilled, and appreciated “community stewards” are a key component. These stewards are often unsung heroes in their communities. They’re volunteers managing online neighborhood groups, newsletters, and boards. And we’ve has developed a number of insights about what it requires to care for these stewards and their online communities to fuel connections and social trust on- and offline.
A lot of our work now is scaling what they’ve learned to other communities through a platform that can serve as a new vital American institution; a transformative space for local conversation and community that invests in people, practices, and platforms — not just tech.
As a part of our presentation, we would spend the time speaking to this research and our insights, along with ways that we can make the internet local again; bringing people's attention to the places we are, inspiring a deeper sense of belonging, and ultimately creating healthy spaces online that help people thrive.
Mozilla Festival Community; Social Moment
MozFest sessions close at 10pm. Join us the next morning to pick up your badge, if needed.
Mozilla Festival Community; Social Moment
MozFest sessions close at 7pm. Join us the next morning to pick up your badge, if needed.
Mozilla Festival Community; Social Moment
Thanks for joining us at MozFest!!! Join us again next year in 2026!
Mozilla Festival Community; Social Moment
Have your QR code ready and head to Badge Pickup at Main Entrance to collect your badge.
When re-entering after picking up your badge, scan your badge on the front path and walk through the Badge Pick Up area into the venue.
Venue exit is through the turret.
Mozilla Festival Community; Social Moment
Have your QR code ready and head to Badge Pickup at Main Entrance to collect your badge.
When re-entering after picking up your badge, scan your badge on the front path and walk through the Badge Pick Up area into the venue.
Venue exit is through the turret.
Mozilla Festival Community; Social Moment
Have your QR code ready and head to Badge Pickup at Main Entrance to collect your badge.
When re-entering after picking up your badge, scan your badge on the front path and walk through the Badge Pick Up area into the venue.
Venue exit is through the turret.
Vince Trost; Talk
Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving from text predictors into logical reasoners with the potential to revolutionize how we engage with knowledge, design systems, and create digital tools. Yet their power is constrained by the limits of context—short-term memory and engineering workarounds that restrict their ability to sustain deep reasoning across tasks and time.
This session features Vince Trost, co-founder of Plastic Labs, whose work explores extending LLM memory and building systems that transcend context engineering. Drawing from his experiments and real-world applications, Vince will outline a new design paradigm for reasoning systems—one that enables continuity, resilience, and human–AI collaboration at scale.
E.M. Lewis-Jong, Keoni Mahelona, Johann Diedrick, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Dr. Gina Moape, Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, Rashel Moritz; Forum
Join us for a conversation on bringing inclusive, representative data into AI — exploring data sovereignty, openness, and equity. We’ll talk about actual case studies that represent those values and what it really takes to build datasets for fair, representative systems. A Mozilla Festival-style deep dive: bold, curious, and unapologetically honest.
Moderator - EM Lewis-Jong
Panelists:
* Keoni Mahelona - Te Hiku Media
* Pedro Ortiz Suarez - Common Crawl Foundation
* Dr. Gina Moape - University of South Africa
* Rashel Moritz - Meta
* Johann Diedrick - Mozilla Data Collective
* Sarah Pearson - Creative Commons