"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.
phoneymouse@lemmy.world 6 months 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.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 6 months 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. 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.
valen@lemmy.world 6 months ago
If you’re interested in donating, go to foundation.mozilla.org/en/?form=donate
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
What’s stopping web standards from being made simple or unchanging enough for a smaller project to maintain a functional web browser?
RubberElectrons@lemmy.world 6 months 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.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 6 months 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 6 months 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 6 months 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 6 months ago
You can donate Mozilla , and I do. 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.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 6 months 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.”