𝔗𝚎𝚑 𝔅𝚊𝚖𝚜𝚔𝚒What's going on at Mozilla these days?
macattackTheir current userbase is not their target userbase. They are trying to reach a more mainstream audience but all of their attempts to monetize are seen as useless by their current userbase.
- They want to increase revenue w/ ads - A loud swath of FF users are tech savvy and have adblocking enabled
- They want to pivot towards AI - A loud swath of FF users see AI as gimmicky
Repeat ad-nauseum
Snot FlickermanIt really is strange. They really should be copying the success of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia.
Especially right now as Google is truly finally breaking a lot of adblocking and pushing a fight with adblockers in the YouTube space.
It’s a perfect storm of opportunity to stand out as a solid, differing offer, but they’re going to blow it as usual.
ShakeThatYamI’m willing to bet that the people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren’t the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla. People in online forums talk a big game about wanting to pay for products and not be the product. But it seems like people don’t really want to pay any meaningful amount of money for a browser.
osaerisxerothe people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren't the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla
I went to donate to Mozilla when I switched back to it from chrome early last year. It said on their website by the donate link, which was very difficult to find, that the proceeds from those donations did not go towards firefox but towards their other projects.
I don't know if that's the case today, but there was no way to contribute to firefox directly when I sought it out, or at least not in a way I could find. Maybe it was a stipulation of the Googlegeld, idk.
They really should be copying the success of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia
Step 1: Be hilariously wealthy from prior investments and businesses
Step 2: Do a thing nobody has ever done before at a time when interest rates mean money is free
Step 3: Blind luck
I'm not sure how they're supposed to reproduce those at this point.
Yeah, the amount of money they get from donations is so tiny compared to what they need for developing Firefox, that they don’t even divert it for Firefox.
They use it for activism, community work and in the past, they’ve also passed it on to other open-source projects, which are also important for the web but don’t have the infrastructure or public awareness to get donations directly.
They use it for activism, community work and in the past, they’ve also passed it on to other open-source projects, which are also important for the web but don’t have the infrastructure or public awareness to get donations directly.
They also had that money to pay one of their C-suite employees a $7m dollar salary.
That’s unnecessary. Everything upwards of like 300k is not salary, it’s business money. That person is a natural business.
I’m not donating to them because of where the money goes. Would donate to Firefox the moment it becomes possible.
Big difference to the Wikimedia Foundation is how much money they need. The Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox) has around 750 employees.
Optimistically, only 500 of those are devs and work on Firefox. If you pay those a wage of 100,000 USD, that makes 75 million USD of costs just for wages.
Firefox has less than 200 million monthly active users, so everyone using it would need to donate $0.375, or alternatively 1% of users would need to donate $37.50, yearly.
That’s a lot of money to hope people donate, and this is a very optimistic ballpark estimate.
trainsaresexyI don’t understand why cryptocurrency isn’t an accepted solution to this. Open firefox, attach wallet, drip $0.25/month/user. It’s good for tiny transactions.
Because crypto just has such a stink on it.
It may well be a reasonable solution for this specific problem, but still… no one is going to get behind this.
Yes now it does, it’s beyond soured. But it’s a strange disconnect. Ignoring all the social commentary and looking for the most practical solution for making small pay-per-use payments - it was right there.
Maaaaaybe. I think the actual advantages over other methods are fairly intangible.
If “surfing the web” required making many very small anonymous payments every hour then yeah, there’s advantages. I’ll admit that doesn’t actually sound terrible - I’d rather pay a few cents to read articles than the current advertising & subscription model.
As a solution for mozilla in isolation though, it would be an over engineered solution with too much baggage. Current mozilla users might have the aptitude for something like this but Mozilla wants to seduce a larger market share which is not people like us.
Ya I think the ship has sailed, maybe one day. Right now it would be a loony toons move.
Check it out:
lemmy.world/post/19946376?scrollToComments=true
The dilema of charging the users and a solution by integrating blockchain to fediverse - Lemmy.World
I’m planing hosting an instance, and I think that in the end I’ll have to let the users pay for subscription. But just when I was imagining how I should design the subscription, I found there’s a dilemma arose from the nature of fediverse: (assume that people really like my instance for some reason) 1. If I charge my users, they may simply register on another instance and keep interacting with my instance to avoid paying the fees. 2. I can limit activities of the users who don’t register on my instance to force them to subscribe my instance, but such action is obviously destructive to the fediverse. I think this is not only my own problem. I think every instances with some scale faces the issue of costs, and relying on donation forever may not be a long term solution. So here’s the question: how to let the owners of the instances get paid without violating the values of fediverse, i.e. decentralization and federation? Moreover, the solution should let the instances with higher popularity earn more money, so that’ll encourage people to host high-quality instances. And I just figured out a (possibly very rough) solution by integrating blockchain to fediverse. First, there will be a blockchain. There will be these cryptocurrencies: 1. the universal currency, let’s say “fedicoin”. Fedicoin can be traded on trading platforms like normal cryptocurrencies. 2. the currency of every single instance, e.g. InstanceA coin for InstanceA, InstanceB coin for InstanceB. The instance-specific coins are only used for federation between instances. and the blockchain holds these data: 1. how many fedicoins and instance-specific coins each instances owns. 2. how many fedicoins each non-instance users owns, if any. I guess it would be better that only the instances can own instance-specific coins. For operating the blockchain, there should be nodes to hold the data and process the transactions. The nodes can be either served by the instances or the non-instance machines. The nodes earn fedicoins. When instances are federating with each other, every “demand” requires paying some instance-specific coins. The price of each type of demand will be predefined in the federation APIs. For example, if a user on InstanceB want to post on InstanceA, then InstanceB have to pay 10 lemmy.world coin to lemmy.world, and vise versa. To earn instance-specific coins to pay for the demands, all the instances will “trade” automatically with other instances, and the “exchange rate” will be determined by some algorithm, possibly based on the amount of demands between each two instances. For example, if on average the demand from InstanceB to lemmy.world is 5 times more than the demand from lemmy.world to InstanceB, than in a trade, InstanceB may get 1000 lemmy.world coin, while lemmy.world may get 5000 InstanceB coin. There will be an upper limit for every instance to own other instances’ coins. For example, when lemmy.world owns 100,500 InstanceB coins, which exceeds the limit 100,000, then lemmy.world will refuse to trade with InstanceB by InstanceB coins. Under such condition, InstanceB have to trade with lemmy.world by the fedicoin. The owners of InstanceB will have to purchase fedicoin to let InstanceB trade with lemmy.world to maintain the fedaration. Currently I think that the exchange rate between fedicoin and an instance-specific coin should be controlled by the owners of each instance, because each instance may have different costs for machines and moderation. Finally, (hopefully) we’ll have a fediverse like this: 1. The highly-demanded instances earn fedicoins, which can be exchanged to real-world currencies. Such mechanism also encourages hosting high-quality instances and more open federation. 2. The instances can simply charging their users normally by real-world currencies, so the users don’t have to bother about cryptocurrencies. Other side notes: Defining the prices of the demands may be tricky? For example, if my understanding is correct, there’s no actual action like “read” when instances are communicating with APIs. For the automatic trades between instances, of course there should be some controllable configuration, e.g. “don’t buy coins over some price from some instances”. I’m just interested in the fediverse, and I hope my ideas can be helpful for its development. Any comments or crossposting are welcome and thank you for your reading.
Oh man. What a shit show honestly.
I’m a strong supporter of paying for things but this is not the way.
Yes. I actually shared it before I started reading, and ya it’s bad.