"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw… existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement… "
We desperately need a company like Mozilla to take the reigns of something like Lemmy. The original developers are far too biased and short sighted to see the bigger picture, it needs to be an independent group that promotes more open source development.
Yeah I’ve considered leaving Lemmy because of who is in charge of development right now. They were not ready for its sudden burst in popularity and are not handling it well.
Time for a repo fork?
I like Mozilla, I respect their mission and their good nature. I can’t help but feel the billions they receive from Google make it too easy for them to be, at best, unfocused and, at worst, lazy. They offer a lot of random services like this. I fear this play is just chasing another possible mediocre revenue generator for them. Like pocket, like Mozilla vpn and private relay, etc.
Maintaining a web browser is an intensely cost and time prohibitive endeavor, especially nowadays. The FOSS community can maintain a lot of things but the sheer scale of Firefox, the need for expertise, the necessary labor, it just can’t be done by volunteers and donations, at least not without using Chromium. They have to get a cash infusion from somewhere.
I don’t like it anymore than you do but ultimately the issue isn’t Mozilla, it’s the state of the technology market. Silicon Valley is no place for a non-profit organization right now, no matter how much we need it.
What we need is regulations and anti-trust, but even that may not truly save us.
They need money. That’s it. That’s the long and short of it.
What’s stopping web standards from being made simple or unchanging enough for a smaller project to maintain a functional web browser?
At this point the web is about as complex as an operating system in terms of complexity. That needs really strong specific standards in order for it to work, and in turn projects like web browsers are huge and complex.
If someone wanted to build a web browser that only followed the simpler parts of the specifications, it wouldn’t work for many websites* and people would not use that browser.
*Whether or not sites need to be so complex is another question entirely, but the reality right now is that they are
Occasionally when I do web stuff I look into the big frameworks but quickly get overwhelmed and go back to simple html/css/js, so yeah I kind of just don’t get what the point is or why anyone needs or wants complexity there. Large websites always do most stuff serverside anyway it seems, so where is this complexity even getting used? It is very mysterious to me. Suspect Google etc. are pushing stuff no one needs in this regard as well to move the web towards something only they can handle.
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