Comment by klez
2 days ago
Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was).
I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC.
Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads.
What a wonderful thing we've created.
I think “IRC (an open protocol)” served more to explain the why than the what here. It frames the whole rest of the story and why GP felt alienated.
It wasn’t because Mozilla stopped using GP’s favorite chat software. It’s because GP was a believer in the mission and the principles. Switching from an open system to a corny corporate one made the whole illusion fall apart. Mozilla was a corp all along and they took their volunteers for a ride.
Is there a widely-used open modern chat network? Specifically, I'm fine with the feature set of IRC, but I want durable messages and a mobile client.
Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.
Yes, Matrix. It all seems a bit overengineered, but it's open and has good clients, and all the modern features you'd expect.
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For what it's worth there are some web front-ends to IRC that make it more approachable from the modern crowd. [1][2] These both have live demo's
[1] - https://thelounge.chat/
[2] - https://convos.chat/
> but I want durable messages and a mobile client.
And IRCv3 has chat history to provide that. But https://snikket.org/ (XMPP) is more likely aligned with what you are looking for
I just run emacs with termux proot debian.
It just works.
Sounds like some decision-maker couldn't figure out how to connect to the IRC channel. That's not the right type of management for Mozilla.
Another feeling when reading "(I woudn't know, uBlock is pretty effective)" coming from a volunteer for MDN
Who else would be likely to look at what a web page is trying to get the browser to do, e.g., trigger requests for ads using Javascript. There are a variety of places to look, it is not like this is seriously hidden from those with even the slightest curiousity
That a former MDN volunteer is apparently disappointed by ads on MDN yet satisfied with MDN anyway because of a community-sourced browser add-on. An add-on that can be rendered useless at any time by the browser vendor, including the one that puts ads on MDN
It is not unimaginable that one day uBlock Origin may cease to work on Firefox when Mozilla sells search data to Google as its primary source of income and is actively working on such things as "making ads more private"
I thank the volunteer for their past work on MDN, I'm not singling him out, nor am I holding it against anyone for thinking this way, but I wonder how many uBlock Origin users believe themselves to possess some "specialised knowledge",^1 for lack of a better term, but would be all but helpless against advertising without a solution provided by someone else, e.g., a browser extension
The point I'm making is that today it seems like "knowing which app to install and how to install it" is considered specialised knowledge instead of actually knowing how to avoid ads to an extent where if the app stopped working they could devise another solution
There are definitely some HN users who can do it, and you, dear reader may be amongst them, but it seems, based on the comments I have seen over the years, there are many, many more who cannot. In that sense the situation is a bit like the IRC comment
The more one understands about online ads, the more clear it should be that so-called "ad blockers" is only a temporary solution at best, and these only work with web browsers
IMHO it is important that more people who wish to avoid ads become more curious about how they work instead of only installing a browser extension and concluding the problem is solved for the long-term
1. Many calling themselves "engineers" for example
*wouldn't
IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.)
No wonder people don't want to join it.
(Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)
It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord. Not as many features, but whatever strength discord has it is not UI.
Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.
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I am puzzled by this comment. IRC is a protocol, it is not a software and doesn't have an UI. IRC clients do, and they aren't all the same.
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> IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it.
I consider it a feature that acts as a filter.
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The entire reason Mozilla came into being is to do things like improve the user experience for IRC so we can keep the internet open. There has never been any other reason for Mozilla as an organization to exist.
It's been a while since I last used IRC, but afaik one of the issues with it was that servers revealed the IP address of users to every other user by default. Since the IP is geographic that's one piece of information you could use to doxx someone.
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Dunno man, it’s miles better than discord which bombards me with ads every single time I log in.
UI? Its a protocol.
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It's a skill check.
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What’s wrong with IRCs UI?
I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years as my default browser. Thank you for your work!
Yes, I'd echo thanks to parent, the OA and all still in the trenches.
Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware).
I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.
There were a few years where it was hard to justify using Firefox, it was just so slow compared to Chrome at the time. Nowadays it's fine again.
Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation.
Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla.
So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).
I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.
> But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol).
IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.
Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.
Mozilla ended up switching from IRC to Matrix. Maybe they tested Yahoo Messenger at some point but I'm pretty confident there was never any switch to it (I left in 2016).
> I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004.
The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.
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Do Mozilla really still need volunteers in this day and age? Tbh even in 2015. They are established enough to not need to exploit goodwill.
As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects.
Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit.
The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community.
In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.
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Libtewolf is hopefully there. Ublock origin is pre-installed
Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.
But perhaps the existence of the forks tells the Mozilla management something?
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I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore.
Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?
Of all the forks I think Waterfox is the one with the strongest case that they can continue on even if they have to fully decouple from Mozilla Firefox.