Sarah Jamie Lewis
My mentions are full of bad takes on Mozilla, privacy preserving measurement, and the economics of free software...which I will briefly address, now:
All non-consensual collection of telemetry is unethical.
No you can't just slap a "privacy preserving" label on a mechanism and have it be true.
Even if you could that doesn't bypass the consent obligation.
Yes, Funding free software is complex. developing free software is expensive. I'm a free software dev. I know this. First hand.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
When you set out on a mission driven by principles - you can rightfully expect people to be very wary when you abandon such principles in chase of a dollar.
Especially so given Firefox is a browser whose popularity at the current time extends from it's ability to support addons that block/reject many forms of internet malware (ads inclusive).
Not just the visibility of such malware, but any signals such malware originates.
Any alt mission that aims to bolster such signals is in opposition.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
When people tell you who they are; believe them.
Mozilla is an ad company now, and will eventually seek to make Firefox ad-friendly, with a wrapping of "privacy".
And for some of you that privacy - the differential kind, safeguarded by promises - and maybe some regulation - will be enough.
Perhaps it's even a direction you would want the web to go in.
For others thought, myself included, that path is a betrayal of 2+ decades of the dream of what the web should be.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
I come from a world where "user agent" still has a meaning. A tool that works on my behalf, not subject to the bidding of other forces.
And a world where building such agents is still subject to a code of ethics which precludes allowing others to extract data from such a tool for their own benefit - certainly not without explicit opt-in - and even then, not without a significant upside for the actual user.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
Had Mozilla set out on this mission a decade ago - unburdened by years of increasingly controversial feature additions to Firefox - they might have been able to sell it - we also knew a little less about the the fundamental limitations on aggregated privacy back then, and people would have trusted Mozilla to be an honest-if-curious aggregator.
We do not live in that world any more.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
I understand that's an older view of software, and it dates me a little.
But it shouldn't be - you should expect to be able to use your tools without them contributing a signal to the sales force of some conglomeration.
You should expect to be asked before your tooling does something unexpected and not for your exclusive benefit.
You are worth that.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
Sadly, I don't think there is any easy answer as to "well what do we do now?"
The web is a complicated, ever-evolving stack of protocols. The CSS spec alone now spans over a dozen documents.
And those specs are being primarily moved forward by advertising companies.
It's a pay-to-play game that dominates the web complicated more by the fact that all reference implementations require constant security updates.
Forking a browser is easy. Maintaining a fork is a red queen's race.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
More people should build RSS readers from scratch, make them awesome. Give them great features. Make them extensible. Integrate Activity Pub. Support blog publishing Avoid webviews.
Make it easy to publish and share stuff. While still being web-compatible.
Beachheads outside - but compatible with - the browser ecosystem.
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