Comment by c0l0
1 year ago
"No better place to leave for" seems an apt way to put it.
I think/fear that in the long run, there will be fewer and fewer ways to participate in activities and communities on the web on your own terms, as only a vetted, allowlisted set of client builds (that may be "open source" on the tin, but by that point it is effectively meaningless) will be able to pass CDN "anti-abuse" restrictions. It will not be a better web, but it sure will be more profitable for some.
> No better place to leave for
This is an amazingly common psychological trap. You wouldn't believe the number of people, men as well as women, who end up in the therapy chair, at the police station or at the hospital A&E, because they are "stuck" with a violent and abusive partner.
The modern tech landscape is all about abuse. People use fancy names for it like "enshitification" or "rot economy" - but at the end of the day it's about domination and abusive relations.
A very common position here is that the victim sees "no alternative".
And... surprise surprise, where they get that idea from is the partner, friends, group/organisation that is also toxic and colludes in gas-lighting and co-abusing the victim into a limited worldview.
Once the victim spends any amount of time outside that mental prison, they regain perspective and say... "Oh, so I actually do have choices!".
This is a poor analogy. There are thousands of people to meet and bond with, so you do have a choice. But there are less than a handful of fundamentally different browsers.
Derivative browsers don't really count here, as they depend on the upstream to not hurt them. For instance, if the parent project completely removes something essential for privacy, it it a lot of work to keep it in your code. The Manifest v2 removal is an example. Over time, when other changes are built on the removal, this creates an increasingly high burden. Eventually, the child project is starved. You simply do not want to be in this position.
> This is a poor analogy. There are thousands of people to meet and bond with, so you do have a choice. But there are less than a handful of fundamentally different browsers.
This is because users decided that they want a browser that spies on them.
At least in Germany in hacker and IT-affine circles, you will often be frowned upon if you voluntarily use Chrome or Edge (except if you have a really good reason).
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I don't think the analogy is weakened by bringing numbers/quantity into it. The dynamics work for any number of principals. Take a 3 player game, where Alice trusts Bob but is better off with Bill, however Bill is not visible to her because of chaff/disinfo/noise broadcast by Bob or Bob's confederates.
It's not what Mozilla does, it's about what Mozilla says/claims.
Mozilla is a deceptive/defective entity here.
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Okay. So why don't you tell us what the better choice(s) are?