I'm sad to see this. I was really hoping that Mozilla would try to make this a part of their long-term strategy.
Generally I think that even for organizations that are sympathetic to Mastodon's aims, running accounts, let alone an instance, is a hard sell in terms of ROI. Even large and well-funded organizations are reasonable to use the funds they allocate for social media outreach where they will be most effective. So I'm generally understanding of organizations focusing their efforts elsewhere, as much as I wish that they had a Mastodon presence.
But it does seem like the Fediverse is more closely aligned with Mozilla's putative strategic goals than is true for most organizations, which was evident in what they said about their reasons for starting an instance. So it does strike me as an odd and troubling change in direction that they are shutting down the instance for which there was so much initial fanfare.
I will say that many of the replies in that thread on the Mozilla instance plans to shutdown are pretty toxic, and that seems to be a pretty frequent phenomenon for their posts, so I can imagine that might have dampened their enthusiasm.
It's not that I expect people to agree with all their actions or give them nothing but positive feedback, but often the replies are not even looking for dialog and start by assuming bad faith; that's not the sort of thing you can productively engage with.
For #Firefox to be sustainable as a meaningful alternative, they need to grow their browser market share (or at least the market share of gecko-based browsers) and diversify their income stream, and so it is probably true that #Mozilla needs to try some somewhat radical things now (while they still have a bunch of Google cash to use). While I won't defend the ways in which they're rolling them out, their efforts to integrate generative AI and privacy-preserving ad tech make a lot of sense in that light.
A lot of people think generative AI will transform every aspect of computing in the near future. I don't really buy that personally, but I do think it will remain significant for certain use cases, so facilitating integration with generative AI models and experimenting with local models for privacy is not unreasonable.
People is blocking ads because of those three:
- Current ads are resource hungry (if you use a metered conection, you can end up paying 10 times more if you don't block them), noisy and disruptive (popups, interstitial ads, video...).
- Current ads include client side code that can be used to insert malware in your favourite pages. Happened too many times.
- Privacy. Even fully anonymous tracking is too much.
If they want people to stop blocking ads, they have to go back to text only or one image only ads, with no extras like CSS or JS, no animations, and no profiling at all.
Everything else is a waste of time and patience.
Current Mozilla efforts are pointless and tone deaf. They are doing more to damage Mozilla Foundation reputation than anything else. And it is tarnished enough as it is.
Mozilla should stop shilling for corporate money, and think about users real needs. Otherwise, they will continue bleeding users, and there is no corporate money for sofware without users.
@jgg As you can see in my post to which you're replying, I don't like online advertising and I think it's bad for that to the the basis of funding the web, so there's no point arguing about that, because we already agree there. However, what I'm saying is that it *is* the current financial basis of the web, and changing that won't be accomplished tomorrow or even next year.
So long as advertising is the life blood of the web, it won't really matter if we like it. We will either have to accept it in some form or kill the open web (by either driving sites to close or driving them to make most of their content available only via propriety app). Meanwhile Google is flirting with integrating features into the browser that will effectively allow websites to prevent ad blocking.
For the time being, a small minority can use effective ad blocking and privacy tools, so long as it's not enough to really hurt revenues. But if it remains a small minority then web technology can change to make it untenable, and if it becomes a larger proportion of people then sites will basically have to fight back against losing all their revenue, which won't result in any better outcome.
So the only sustainable path is to offer another option, which is what #Mozilla is trying to do. Maybe that option isn't the right one, but I think they're correct to try something in that area.
While I'm not crazy about crypto, one thing I liked about the idea of BAT in Brave is that it would naturally create the option of micropayments to sites in instead of having to get ads, so it could theoretically create more privacy-respecting ads and also a path away from ad-based revenue. Unfortunately websites didn't seem to pick up integration (to get the payments), Brave turned out to maybe not be all that trustworthy, and Brave is based on Google's rendering engine so it still allows Google a lot of de facto power over web standards.
Well, I'm writing now in a web site with no paywalls or any kind of ads. There was a web before ads, and there is still a web without them. Of course, the truly open web is much smaller than the commercial web, but still there it is.
I can't speak about other places, but in Spain (I'm Spanish) nearly all newspapers and streaming video platforms require payments. All the others are asking for donations. For many people, ads are not enough to pay the servers, let alone paying wages. So I agree with you: the commercial open web is dying.
If Chrome starts blocking ad blockers, people will stop using Chrome. That's the main reason Google still hasn't done it.
I think current Chrome and Firefox efforts are simply missing the point. After 20 years of ad network abuse, people has had more than enough shit, and embedding it in candy is not going to make them eating it. It's not the browsers that have to change, it's the ad networks.
The only way people is going to stop using blockers is if ad networks stop being assholes.
The only way online advertising can thrive is if they stick to facts and respect people, which is the opposite to what they have been doing the last 20 years.
Maybe somebody will find someday a way to finance comercial webs that doesn't involve visitor's money or ads, but if nobody has done it in 25 years, I'm not very optimistic.
Maybe it is for the best. Webs being supported by ads is the reason we have clickbait, enshittification, sponsored articles, and AI generated garbage mills. If the demise of online ads kills half of it, it wouldn't be half bad.
@jgg I remember the early, largely ad-free web. It was cool, but much, much smaller, and only of limited practical use. And it was an experiment, while people tried to learn how it could be used and how to make money off of it. It was never a sustainable state. Likewise, the current situation on Mastodon is not a sustainable state. It takes money to keep a site online, and people who work on them or produce the content they host have to eat. A vibrant web cannot exist without some way for people to get paid.
The vast majority of the browser market runs on WebKit and Blink, so if Google and Apple come to some mutually agreeable arrangement, they can force pretty much whatever they want on the rest of us. That's precisely why we need a resurgent #Firefox or other 3rd rendering engine.
I understand you seem to think that no one is willing to put up with ads in any form, but I think you may be over-generalizing your own attitudes. People widely use Google services (including Chrome and Android) and commercial social media sites, which are well known to make all their money off advertising and surveillance. Free apps (which necessarily make money primarily off advertising and surveillance) dominate mobile app stores. I might like to live in a world where most normal people won't put up with advertising (because that's my own attitude), but we simply don't live in that world.
Subscriptions can work for some very popular/large site or niche sites with a very committed audience, but they don't work for sites in general because there are too many. That would only potentially work with a functional micropayments infrastructure that does not exist. It's also debatable whether it's working for news sites, at least in the US, other than the few largest outlets.
It seems like your solution is to let the open web diminish to a shadow of its former self, starved of resources. I agree that's an option, but I'm not sure it's a desirable one. But, in any case, I think it's clear that won't be the position of people making a web browser, so then it is rational for them to seek some form of privacy-preserving advertising as an alternative, and it doesn't make sense for people to vilify them for that (as I've seen here and elsewhere); they're just trying to explore one of the few open avenues for a vibrant open web to continue. It might not work in the end, but it's a reasonable thing to try.
Ads on the web can have a future. But they need to be respectful with people. No tracking, no profiling, no waste of resources, no bullshit. Since ad networks seem unable to do it by themselves, maybe some legal changes are in order, for their own good.
People changing browsers in mass happened before, and will happen again. Firefox is still a thing, and Chrome engine is a fork of a fork, that can be forked again very easily. Nearly all of the alternative browsers put privacy and ad blocking as two of the main reasons for switching to them for a reason. Even the marketing people admits that nearly half of the people are blocking them already (https://devrix.com/tutorial/ad-blockers-marketing-hacks/). I'm pretty sure that many people in the other half lacks the technical expertise to do it. When Apple asked all the iPhone users if they wanted tracking, 90% of them said no. I would be very surprised if more than 80% of people were to know what is tracking. So I attribute those 10% to people that answered at random to get rid of the question.
I don't think the current situation on Mastodon is unsustainable. It is currently paid by volunteers and donations, exactly what Wikipedia has been doing from the beginning.
About free apps: as any Linux user can demonstrate, ads are not required at all to have quality free software. The main reason there is not much more free software for Android is because Google is always promoting paid and ad ridden apps: they pay for top spots, and Google makes a cut of payments and puts most of the ads. So open source apps don't have users, so developers don't bother making apps for Android. Even worse, Google is always changing APIs and Google Play requirements, which have already killed more than half the Android open source apps ever made. That's is really dishearthening for something you made out of love.
It doesn't stop us having real open source app gems, like AntennaPod, FairEmail, K-9, Lemuroid, Krita, OsmAnd or a variety of browsers. What would we have, if they were free of Google's sabotage?
To be fair, Apple is even worse: they don't even admit GPL apps in their App Store.
I think the argument is even stronger for Mozilla's foray into privacy preserving advertising. The reality is that the current Internet runs on advertising dollars. I think that's bad, and I would like that to change, but if it's possible to change that it will be difficult and take a fair amount of time. In the interim, you can just block or evade advertising if you have a tiny sliver of the browser market, but if you have any significant share then doing so will essentially put you in a battle with every site your users want to visit. Either sites will work poorly on your browser (because they're trying fight your features), or you'll kill the sites your users are using (by starving them of revenue).
That means you have to find some less-privacy-invasive, near-term solution to the advertising funding problem as a bridge to the future. Brave already tried this with their BAT system, but it hasn't really seemed (to me) to go anywhere. Mozilla is making another run at it. I don't know if their solution will be a good one, but it needs to be tried. We cannot grow a significant alternative browser ecosystem by starving site of revenue; that only works for niche browsers.
And doing this work might also put Mozilla in a good position to offer an alternative to advertising-based revenue, just as Brave was trying to do with BAT.