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   Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 14:47:41 JST Evan Prodromou

   I like playing video games and board games with an economic component. In these games, you build farms or factories or mines or whatever, and they generate resources that you can use to build armies or research centres or monuments, which in turn let you build more farms and mines and so on.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 14:50:44 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     There's a moment, when you're losing this kind of game, that you realize you don't have the resource generation needed to drive growth. The orc armies are moving in, and you don't have enough manganese to make Armoured Infantry II. So you lose those wheat fields you do have to the orcs, and now you have even less resources, which gives you even less optionality for defence or growth.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 14:53:44 JST Evan Prodromou

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     It'd be nice to play games where you can have a little barley field and a little wood lot and a little university and you just chill and eat mushroom barley soup and write poetry by your wood fire. But usually in these games, if you don't grow, others will. The world changes around you. And they will overlook you for a while if you keep a low profile, but eventually they'll come take what little you have.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 14:57:59 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     Technology is not a game, but it kind of also is. Mozilla had a great product, Firefox, which ran on Open Source and open standards. At its peak, in the late 2000s, it had about 30% of the global browser market. That gave Mozilla a lot of optionality for generating resources -- resources it could invest in other projects that reflected its values.

     Steve's Place repeated this.
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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:05:51 JST Evan Prodromou

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     But Mozilla hasn't been able to use Firefox to level up. It tried a lot of things -- Firefox OS being the biggest bet -- that for one reason or another didn't pan out. Meanwhile, their resource base was eroding from 30% of all Web users to about 2% today. Their biggest customer, Google, which paid them for access to browser users, built their own Open Source and open standards browser, which became much more popular.

     Steve's Place repeated this.
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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:06:35 JST Evan Prodromou

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     Mozilla is so dependent on Google today that they begged US courts not to enforce antitrust laws against Google, because it would hurt their only source of revenue.

     https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/google-search-deals-and-browser-choice/

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:09:24 JST Evan Prodromou

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     I don't know if Mozilla is definitively boxed in at this point. Maybe there's an act 3 for them somewhere. I use their VPN and it's fine. They have a few other paid products.

     They've repeatedly failed to leverage their Firefox userbase to build other products -- the mobile OS, of course, but also Mozilla Social, which they shut down without ever really launching it.

     Eventually, that userbase is going to be too small to launch anything off of.

     Steve's Place repeated this.
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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:11:42 JST Evan Prodromou

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     For those of us who depended on Mozilla as a standard bearer for open source and the open web, it's disheartening to see that ember dying. We needed a Mozilla that launched new products, not one that shut them down without moving forward.

     Steve's Place repeated this.
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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:14:40 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     Wikipedia is in a similar bind -- although from the comments, I think it's only obvious to Wikimedia insiders right now. Wikipedia has fallen from a peak of about 5th-biggest web site to about 12th today. Still huge, but trending in the wrong direction.

     /mastodon/gutocarvalho repeated this.
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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:16:07 JST Evan Prodromou

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     • Luis Villa

     My friend @luis_in_brief has written a couple of good articles about Wikipedia's collapsing web traffic:

     https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-decline-by-topic/

     https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-career-cliff/

     I especially found this article about how Wikipedia's "flat" traffic growth over the last decade masks a precipitous decline in relative Web traffic:

     https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

     My former colleague Marshall Miller at WMF wrote about a vertiginous 8% quarterly drop in Wikipedia page views at the end of 2025:

     https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:22:56 JST Evan Prodromou

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     Page views are the lifeblood of Wikipedia. Content generation and revenue derive from this important source. When search summaries or AI chatbots insert themselves between readers and Wikipedia, they cut the project off from that content source and revenue.

     https://cosocial.ca/@evan/116520288172210460

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:25:16 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     I wrote about this in 2017.

     https://evanp.me/2017/08/14/wikipedia-is-a-two-way-street/

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:27:03 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     Since that time, Wikimedia Foundation has made a lot of deals with big companies who reuse Wikipedia and other Wikimedia data. (As a staff member, I was part of the initial product discovery for those deals.) I don't think any of those deals has taken into account the need for editing affordances in re-use products.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:31:48 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     A lot of the commenters on this poll have noted the different approaches to LLMs by both Mozilla and Wikimedia. Mozilla has started https://mozilla.ai/ and is actively working on AI features in Firefox. Wikimedia has been less enthusiastic, and English Wikipedia banned wholesale rewrites of WP articles with AI. https://www.theverge.com/tech/901461/wikipedia-ai-generated-article-ban

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:32:22 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     I'm not sure either of those policies is going to matter in the long run.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:35:46 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     So, here's the hard part of the poll question: *inevitable* decline. Have these two major projects reached a point where their optionality has run out, and they're going to just keep shrinking, failing to support other projects in the ecosystem, living with less and less? Losing the manganese mine, losing the barley fields, trying to stretch the last of the soup next to a cold fire as the orcs beat down the last walls of the university?

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:39:22 JST Evan Prodromou

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     I don't know, honestly.

     My harsh assessment is that Mozilla has developed a culture of quitters -- they kill products long before they've had a chance to thrive.

     Wikimedia, on the other hand, is an intrinsically conservative ecosystem. I don't know if it has the culture to try new things. They may try cutting their way to success, too, like with the shutdown of Wikinews.

     https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_closes_Wikinews_after_21_years

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:44:23 JST Evan Prodromou

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     And I guess that's surfacing something important about both cases -- and a chance to overextend my metaphor. Pulling out of a death spiral in a video game requires a lot of knowledge of the game, and a certain willingness to take risks. You have to sometimes send an expeditionary force through the mountains to find a uranium mining site. Or you put all your barley resources into building a war blimp. If you don't know these long-shot options are possible, you won't try them, and you'll fail.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:50:22 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     What could Mozilla do? Build cloud services attached to your Firefox account -- like Google and Apple have. Use their reputation for openness and privacy to attract a generation of users who are despondent over Big Tech.

     What could Wikimedia do? Use public pressure and shame to rewrite those deals. And also disintermediate -- get directly connected to users, with (yes) chatbots and voice assistants of their own.

     Or maybe even wilder things. I don't know everything; I'm just some guy.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:52:55 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     Anyway, I'm going to choose to stay hopeful. I think most of the options for these two big organizations are revolutionary and not evolutionary. But I believe they still exist. I'm going to say Neither, but ask me again next year.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:58:24 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Open Risk

     @openrisk Signal is a good example. They've mostly managed to pivot from the big one-time donation from the WhatsApp founder and licensing deals with Big Tech for the Signal protocol trademark to user donations, which now make up the majority of their income. Not enough to cover costs, but a good place to be. I think one question is when they diversify what they offer.

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     Open Risk (openrisk@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 15:58:25 JST Open Risk

     in reply to

     @evan agree on both. People vote with their hearts, but what's happening is the techno-orcs have sucked the oxygen out of all the heroic old-time projects. Not an insider but I wouldn't be surprised if Wikipedia is dropping because it too is no longer needed as fig leaf. They took some risky bets (I know of abstract Wikipedia, wikibase) but they didn't flourish. Actually I can't think of any growing open project today that touches *mass* audiences. Signal with their 70 mln users comes closest.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 16:00:34 JST Evan Prodromou

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     • aeva

     @aeva I think you have an adorably romantic mental model of how big Open Source works.

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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 16:00:36 JST aeva

     in reply to

     @evan the thing that bums me out about firefox is it shouldn't matter if mozilla lives or dies. it's open source! but it got built up so big and the stakes are so high it might not be enough just to have a community of people who give a shit to try to maintain it. i think they crossed the point of no return on accident a long time ago and google has just been keeping them on life support as an anti-anti-trust talisman since then

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 16:12:33 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     I say all this with deep love and respect. I have lived and will die a believer in wikis. I believe in open source and the open web. I love my friends and colleagues at both organisations and I hope they keep their jobs and thrive. I want them to succeed.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 16:35:45 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     I should also say that the Wikimedia editor community is a big drag on developing new interfaces for editing, since the editors are also the fact checkers. Getting a flood of new edits from ChatGPT users or Alexa users or Google search users is a WP editor's worst nightmare.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 16:57:41 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Pax Ahimsa Gethen

     @funcrunch both of those are economic games that depend on growth. They're fine examples. You can get boxed in on both games.

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     Pax Ahimsa Gethen (funcrunch@me.dm)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 16:57:42 JST Pax Ahimsa Gethen

     in reply to

     @evan

     Sounds like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, or any number of other "cozy" games that don't focus on combat. (Which doesn't really help your analogy, admittedly)

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 17:38:44 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Sam Wilson

     @samwilson something to look forward to!

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     Sam Wilson (samwilson@wikis.world)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 17:38:45 JST Sam Wilson

     in reply to

     @evan We'll still be migrating off jQuery UI at that point, so at least we'll be occupied as the walls fall.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 17:55:02 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Chris Trottier

     @atomicpoet yeah, good point!

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     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org)'s status on Tuesday, 05-May-2026 17:55:03 JST Chris Trottier

     in reply to
     @evan For what its worth, I used to think CBC was a hopeless organization in the face of Netflix and YouTube. But it turns out that it's now one of the few news sources I trust, and they've done more for Canadian sports than Rogers.
     
     Sometimes it takes a catalyst for people to realize why an institution is important.
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     M. Grégoire (mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 06-May-2026 03:54:53 JST M. Grégoire

     in reply to

     @evan It's true that she (and other people benefitting from Wikipedia) would be less likely to write an article about that interesting monument in Chittagong than she once was: editing is less at-hand for people who find Wikipedia information via a search engine or an LLM, and mobile devices are ill-suited to writing long, serious texts. The trend seems to be that Wikipedia will have fewer editors and fewer new articles, but like the barley farm, that could remain sustainable.

     2/2

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     M. Grégoire (mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 06-May-2026 03:54:54 JST M. Grégoire

     in reply to

     @evan I was wondering why Wikipedia can't be a "little barley field and a little wood lot and a little university and you just chill and eat mushroom barley soup and write poetry by your wood fire". One of the links you posted ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now ) gives some answers.

     But on reflection, I'm not so sure. I see how the lack of articles in Bengali is a problem; but in 2026, if someone wants to read about Pytheas in Bengali, she can easily use machine translation to do so.

     1/2

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 06-May-2026 03:56:03 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • M. Grégoire

     @mpjgregoire

     So, could the project get along without *new* editors? Probably for a while. But editors move on and stop editing -- there's a pretty high churn on Wikipedia. It would be harder and harder for the editors to keep up.

     It's also a loose-knit group with a lot of conflict that is resolved on-wiki. As people leave, it's harder to do that resolution.

     Gradually, the content would suffer -- which would mean even fewer new editors.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 06-May-2026 03:56:04 JST Evan Prodromou

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     • M. Grégoire

     @mpjgregoire I think the question you're asking is why Wikipedia can't just hit some point in time, park the content there, and call it a day, without attracting new editors?

     Editors are needed all the time for two reasons. One is that the world keeps happening, and we need to include that new knowledge. Second is that Wikipedia is incomplete, and we want to make it better.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 06-May-2026 03:57:27 JST Evan Prodromou

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     • M. Grégoire

     @mpjgregoire I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it's a case where stasis tends to go into a downward spiral.

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     M. Grégoire (mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 06-May-2026 04:21:40 JST M. Grégoire

     in reply to

     @evan Not exactly what I was thinking. In Minecraft (let's say), you want to keep growing, not just in absolute terms, but sufficiently that your strength relative to others remains stable, or else your nation will be destroyed by aggressors.

     1/2