"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… "

  • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • Matt@lemdro.id
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          1 year ago

          Those donations cannot be used for Firefox development due to the structure of Mozilla.

          • Midnitte@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            I’m not entirely sure that’s true. The money goes to Mozilla and Mozilla will use it to fund Firefox (and other projects). It seems to work exactly how one would expect it to work - you just can’t donate directly to a project such as Firefox.

            There are limits to how much money they can move to projects due to their structure as a 501©3, (but all of their projects are towards an open web) so maybe not all of the funding goes to Firefox, but it still does go to Firefox.

            • Matt@lemdro.id
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              1 year ago

              Firefox is part of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation. Donations go to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. Even though Mozilla Corporation is owned by Mozilla Foundation, donations cannot be transferred to it since it is still legally a for-profit business. The funds donated to Mozilla Foundation are used for advocacy work.

        • Zana@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I get paid next week and will definitely be donating, thank you for the link!

      • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This seems like a reasonable and insightful take. Is there a way a non-profit could still survive in silicon valley? For ex, IETF isn’t a profit focused organization.

        • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          I’m not sure if this qualifies exactly but the FOSS 3D package Blender has been surviving for quite some time. They’re in Amsterdam, not silicon valley, but they seem to do really well off primarily donations and funding from some big companies.

          • IAm_A_Complete_Idiot@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I think the key there is funding from big companies. There’s tons of standards and the like in which big companies take part - both in terms of code and financial support. Big projects like the rust compiler, the Linux kernel, blender, etc. all seem to have a lot of code and money coming in from big companies. Sadly there’s only so much you can get from individuals - pretty much the only success story I know of is the wikimedia foundation.

            • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              I may be wrong but I thought they were majority user funded.

              edit: looking at their funding reports it seems that way, but I may be misinterpreting it.

                  • IAm_A_Complete_Idiot@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    I just checked their financial report for 2022 and it looks like 50% came from patron funding (which looks like entirely companies like Google), 5% from epics grant, and then 10% corporate membership. 20% came from individuals, and the rest from random other miscellaneous things like the blender market. If you search blender foundation annual report 2022, the finances breakdown will be near the end of the slides.

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        What’s stopping web standards from being made simple or unchanging enough for a smaller project to maintain a functional web browser?

        • SpaceScotsman@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          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

          • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • dan@upvote.au
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              1 year ago

              simple html/css/js,

              There’s a very large number of DOM and browser APIs now though… Even with basic JS without libraries or frameworks, you can still build fancy 2D and 3D graphics (WebGL), interact with USB devices, allow input via game controllers, stream H264 video, implement custom caching, use push notifications, and a bunch of other things. The web browser has to implement all of that complexity. They’re all useful in different scenarios.

    • paraphrand@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I hope they hit on something stand-out soon. To establish more sustainability. Seems like everything is in change right now.

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What should they be doing instead? Begging for donations? I do agree in general, tho. Seems they should at least be squirreling away some (or most) of that money into a foundation, because they’re obviously going to need it one day.

    • Kodemystic@lemmy.kodemystic.dev
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      1 year ago

      Would be great if they did not get money from google. They could set.up a donations program or something and regularly ask for it like Wikipedia. Donation based browser, peoples Browser.

      • krakenx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You can donate to Mozilla, and I do. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/

        A lot of people will have to donate a lot to equal the amount they are getting from Google though, and if Google pulls that money I feel that Firefox would end before people donate enough to make up the shortfall.

        • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          Money donated to Mozilla goes o ly ti the foundation. The money paid by Google goes to the Mozilla Corp (Firefox).

      • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Asking for a donation would be a damn near fatal blow to retention and they know it. Given how its going with Google’s anti-trust case though, they’ll need to ask for money at some point.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I feel like this relationship of: one company pays a competitor to promote an unrelated product that could very reasonably be used to engage in anti-competitive behavior should at the very least be heavily regulated by the SEC, or possibly just outright prohibited. Alphabet is the epitome of the mega-corporation who has the resources to compete viciously in almost any industry, but has the breadth for plausible deniability about who their competition is.

      “What? Mozilla isn’t competition…browser? Oh you mean chrome? That little thing? Nah, we just do that on the side. We’re an ad company.”

      Meanwhile: “What? Meta? You mean like Facebook? We don’t compete with them, hah, remember Google+? They compete with TikTok…Oh ads? I guess so, but that’s kind of a side thing. We do mobile os/web analytics/email/whatever.”

    • sudafossil@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Yeah revenue generator… They want a full name to get on the wait list, no reason for that except marketing.