Squidward on the floor saying “Future, future”
But actually hexbear does need a future Squidward. We’ve got others but we need future
And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
I’m afraid they aren’t wrong. The majority of people aren’t going to pay for access to random blogs etc. So we’d end up with only the big players having usable sites.
People kick off about ads but rarely suggest an alternative to funding the internet.
Back in the day ads were targeted based on the website’s target audience not the user’s personal data. It works fine but is less effective. Don’t see why they couldn’t go that way.
Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.
It was a different place, but worked ok.
Sounds like you’re forgetting about the dot com bubble. The internet wasn’t fine abck then because nobody really had a sustainable business model.
The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren’t the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc…
The reason I mentioned the dot com bubble is because a lot of the companies back then failed because they couldn’t figure out a sustainable business model. It was mostly hype-driven with the idea of getting users first, then figuring out monetization later.
That’s why we have ad-supported sites today. It was the main business model that was the most sustainable.
There were a lot of small sites, sure, but a lot of them were hosted on services with no real business model. Even back then, not a lot of people self-hosted.
That’s a fair thing to bring up. I think your point went over my head, because I was mostly reminiscing about how the less capital-oriented parts of the internet were relatively pleasant before companies like Facebook came along and encouraged them all (with their newly acquired capital) to jump into the big centralized areas.
The enshitification of Firefox continues 😢
Cory Doctorow: “Disenshittify or die!” (YouTube)
I honestly never expected the final death blow for Firefox to come from Mozilla.
Maybe they’ve been infiltrated by bad actors from Google, parading around as pro-privacy frauds.
Mozilla’s PPA was developed in collaboration with Facebook. While we don’t usually think of that company as advertisement centric, they are, just moreso within their own walled garden of a social network.
parading around as pro-privacy frauds.
Here’s a frighteningly accurate prediction from The Register, written back in January:
…Baker notes: “We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating … This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way.”
Surely not slurping telemetry?
According to the report, the “Mozilla way” is all about privacy, encryption, and keeping customer data safe. Hopefully, it will also be about innovation rather than scattering AI fairy dust over its product line.
What if we could have a world that wasn’t powered by ads? I’d like to get past this “only one way to run the internet” train of thought.
I’m just so tired of ads, commercials and advertising in general. It’s exhausting.
It’s either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I’d suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there’s enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.
Universal Basic Income, ala star trek, is an option, then just let everybody make cool shit.
Star Trek has no Universal Basic Income. It has replicators for all your basic needs.
Replicators, which are universal and basic.
But is not income
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But at least forking is still an option. The instant they make any moves that inhibit forking or privacy on forks, Firefox will be completely dead. For now, it’s just gangrenous.
Good luck with even maintaining that fork up to date , with security threats and web standards changing so quickly.
Chromium manages (obsfucated binary blobs from google still being included aside)
Chromium is developed by Google. It’s not some grassroots fork with user interests in mind…
Frankly, I’m surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt…
May 2023: Mozilla purchases FakeSpot, a company that sells private data to advertisers. Mozilla keeps selling private data to advertisers to this day.
June 2024: Mozilla purchases Anonym, an AdTech company.
Now imagine if they had something to advertise which people actually want!
