17 ms·

Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

386 points by cpeterso 6y ago

kristopolous 6y ago
I missed this... Is there still an opportunity, anyone know?
- lightninglu10 6y ago
  hey @kristopolous! yes we are JUST starting our new summer program. Applications are due June 5th. https://builders.mozilla.community/ https://builders.mozilla.community/ LMK if you have any questions!
  - astlouis44 6y ago
    Hey, so our startup is building the future of games and interactive applications in the browser using WebAssembly. Definitely going to apply!
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    Great! thanks.
deleted 6y ago
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noads 6y ago
This seems somewhat myopic. I get that the culture of the valley is very entrepreneurial and the solution to every problem seems to be another free market competitor, but even if you buy into that ethos completely you have to see how this will fail. The tech giants are now trillion dollar companies. Soon to be multi-trillion dollar companies. They have all the data, because they own all the platforms. They have bent the very protocols the internet is built on to their needs. They can see good ideas or dangerous competitors coming before the competitors themselves even realize what they're onto. There is little to no innovation left at these tech giants, they simple acquire and shut down anything that might turn into a real problem for them. You cannot startup your way out of this quagmire. We need massive government intervention and a breakup of the tech giants, with strong new antitrust rules around future acquisitions. We simply cannot grow or innovate our way out of problems until that happens. Showing your carbon footprint of Amazon purchases is cute and will give you a ton of stuff to virtue signal about at the right cocktail parties, but ultimately it's completely meaningless. You're not changing the internet, you're not changing Amazon with token projects like this.
lightninglu10 6y ago
Hey all, Patrick here & one of the mentors for the Mozilla Builders "fix-the-internet" incubator https://builders.mozilla.community/ https://builders.mozilla.community/. We have 3 different offerings for this Summer. All incubator style, meaning you meet weekly or biweekly with mentors and we really try to help drive you from point A to point C. 1. $75k investment in a startup. MUST be serious about wanting to build something awesome and put in the hard work it takes to do so. 2. $16k funding in a much earlier stage project (idea stage / MVP stage). MUST be serious about commitment it takes to get to launch. 3. OPEN LABS: these are open to the entire community and you have access to the mentors. 10 min checkins each week & peer sessions. We've had TONS of amazing projects for our Open Labs in the Spring and we hope to see TONS more for the Summer. In terms of MISSION and what we're looking for: We started this new incubator out of Mozilla in order to work with & invest in developers, startups, and technology enthusiasts who are building things that will shape the internet and have a positive impact without needing to hyper focus on the bottom line. We call this our ”fix-the-internet” incubator.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cousin_it 6y ago
  Here's my "fix the internet" idea: build a search engine that is itself ad-free, and searches over only the ad-free segment of the web. More options: allow users to exclude sites with ads, sites with ecommerce, sites with tracking, or simply allow users to build and share lists of sites to exclude. Rationale: the unmonetized or under-monetized web was awesome, a lot of it still exists under the radar now, and it would be good to reify it as a tangible thing. Bonus 1: competitors probably won't copy your features. Bonus 2: spam won't be a big problem, as most of it contains ads.
  - duxup 6y ago
    Is there enough content where searching just the ad-free segment is ... worth it? What happens if you're a top result on the add free segment and you start incurring some level of costs? Do you drop off if you add an ad? Granted I really like the idea, I'd love to see it tried, but I wonder what all the unintended consequences would be / skeptical of the value of segregating "ad-free" vs. "has an ad of any sort" vs. the sites that really are a mess.
hartator 6y ago
I thought Mozilla was a non-profit fundation?
- jameslk 6y ago
  I'd assume this is offered by Mozilla's corporate side https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
- est31 6y ago
  There is Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation. The foundation owns the corporation.
  - fabrice_d 6y ago
    Mitchel is now the CEO of Mozilla Corp (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-named-ceo-of-mozilla/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-name...)
    - est31 6y ago
      Thanks for pointing it out. Seems she's also still foundation chair so the two can't be differentiated by their leadership. I've edited my comment to remove the mentions.
gonational 6y ago
Real talk, Mozilla; would you be interested in funding a privacy-oriented fork of Firefox with all the unnecessary extras (Pocket, etc.) stripped out? I’m thinking something just like Firefox, except unencumbered by Google or other corporate affiliations, etc. I think this would be the best first step towards any kind of “fixing the Internet”.
- snazz 6y ago
  This would benefit the couple of people who use that fork of Firefox, but would have no effect on every other Internet user. It's impossible for Mozilla to fund anything "unencumbered by Google or other corporate affiliations" when so much of their money comes from Google.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mmayo 6y ago
  I'm not really speaking for "Mozilla" because what does that even mean? But as one of the folks doing this summer program for Mozilla, I can say 100% we'd be excited to see a good application around this. There's a bunch of great browsers out there, most based on Chromium, but we're all pretty tied up with search as the only way to fund. Brave's made a step away from that, which is cool. I'd love to see more attempts at browsers with different funding models. If you have an idea and at least, say, the beginnings of a small team who could execute, we're available to provide feedback before you submit an application. thx!
- gkoberger 6y ago
  It's tough. People at Mozilla care so much about privacy, to the point that (when I worked there 2010-2012), they refused to do "services" the same way Google did (aka a login and a central server). So as a result, Chrome "just worked" and Firefox was completely unusable. The people at Mozilla really care about privacy. But they also have to build something people can actually use. That means finding a balance between privacy and usability. To you it's "fixing the Internet", but to most normal people it's "removing features." Like, can you imagine explaining to the average user why they can't just type a search into the address bar and get Google results? (More specifically, though, what would you strip? Pocket is owned by Mozilla and is just a fancy bookmark manager, but sure. Google is just a default search; data isn't being sent to them. Outside of those, what would you remove?)
Stoner 6y ago
Hey everyone, my team is in Mozilla's ”fix-the-internet” MVP Lab right now. We're working on Vngle, a decentralized grassroots news network combatting news deserts across America. We're working in Georgia now and will be moving to other states soon. Sign up to stay updated at Vngle.com or follow us on social @VngleStories. https://www.instagram.com/VngleStories/ https://www.instagram.com/VngleStories/
- ckolkey 6y ago
  Really trying to be constructive here: consider investing in one or two more vowels. The "vn" is...rough.
  - sjroot 6y ago
    Looks to be a play on the word “Angle” - in the context of news, this is the point you’re trying to convince your readers of. “What’s your angle?”
    - brobinson 6y ago
      I pronounced it in my head as "vungle"...
      - saurik 6y ago
        I went with "vingle".
- cameronhowe 6y ago
  "Fix the internet" then links your instagram. Seems like you are part of the problem? Edit: Or maybe I have a very different view of what fixing the internet means. The peertube content sponsoring currently on the frontpage seems much more constructive to me.
  - brainless 6y ago
    I totally agree with this. If the internet needs a fix, it is about getting off the big players. Getting off this constant feed of nonsense. Being more personal, more one-to-one instead of "hey look at my feed, it has 2 million mindless people looking at it right now".
detaro 6y ago
previous post by mozilla employees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232
Causality1 6y ago
I thought Mozilla was already on financial life support itself. How do they have money for this?
- hu3 6y ago
  Don't they get half a billion per year from Google?
seemslegit 6y ago
Like everything that Mozilla did for the last decade or so this is far more likely to produce false choices than actual alternatives.
gambler 6y ago
>Developers in a variety of domains were invited to apply, as long as they fit the themes of empowerment, privacy, decentralization, community and so on. Funny. I'm seeing how the Web is being fucked over in exactly these areas, and yet I don't see Mozilla doing anything to stop it. Quite the opposite, they contribute to it and follow Google's lead on most of the issues. Here is the simplest and incredibly impactful user empowerment idea. Assume I have a computer with Firefox and an internet connection. Can I open the browser, press "make a web page" button and create a page with a stable URL (probably a GUID) accessible to other people? Without creating an account some or doing some nerdy shit. Nope. Well, the fact that this basic idea still isn't implemented in the age of "cloud computing" tells you everything you need to know about whether major player in the market (which Mozilla will soon cease to be) want to empower their users.
- DevKoala 6y ago
  Who will host the webpage in your scenario?
  - gambler 6y ago
    Really, this is the question I'm being asked on Hacker News? Are we at the point where an average user here never heard of BitTorrent, Tor and other similar systems? Or is it a way to demand for me to post a complete description of the protocol that would support the feature above? It doesn't matter what the specific protocol is. What matters is that this is not even a goal and it should be.
    - DevKoala 6y ago
      Yes, I am interested in your idea. I agree it is something should happen. However, who would host these sites? I don’t see the solution yet. Maybe you have put more thought into it. Edit: you sound a bit rattled. I didn’t mean to instigate.
    - notriddle 6y ago
      > Are we at the point where an average user here never heard of BitTorrent, Tor and other similar systems? Tor hidden services don't provide permanent storage. It's just a routing protocol. BitTorrent doesn't guarantee storage, either. A popular site will remain de facto stable, but the long tail is a different story. Every. Single. Time. This idea comes up, and it always fails because the economics just don't work out. Someone needs to take care of all those terabytes of data. Routing is pretty cheap, and can basically be thought of as solved by Tor, I2P, IPFS, BitTorrent, etc. If you're willing to keep your PC on 24/7, it's easy, but nobody can expect that. The closest you can get is FreeNet. Kinda. It's better than BitTorrent, but still worse than S3, because of course it is, it's free.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising. In the beginning there were rules. No commercial use. When that was lifted we started the descent into where things are now. It began with a lawyer posting an ad about immigration services to Usenet. It has come a long way since then. All the while, the web browser has supported always advertising, making it easier and easier to consume ads, buy and sell via the web. People in the 1990's who wanted "e-commerce" got their wish. Certain companies and individuals have become wealthy beyond imagination. Companies are hording cash. However it is not an equal playing field. Governments have heretofore been unwilling to regulate. Some, those who are proifiting from the status quo, might say this is starting to change. Even if this is true, the change is very slow. In Mozilla Corporation's domicile, there has been no significant change. Mozilla is funded indirectly by advertising. Their funding comes from Google. Google's funding comes from advertisers.
- naasking 6y ago
  > The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising. Regulation always requires coordination, which is simply not possible at internet scale. Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms, and you're talking about regulation at an even larger scale against strong interests with large financial reserves. What's needed is a secure/private by default browser sandbox so these interests have no say in how their content is consumed. Take a look the extremes Gemini has gone to ensure privacy [1]. Some of those can be relaxed without compromising privacy much, but a serious effort along those lines is what's actually needed. [1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
  - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
    HTTP printf "GET /gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/servers/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: portal.mozz.us\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n"|socat - ssl:portal.mozz.us:443 Gemini printf "/servers\r\n"|socat - gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 However, he seems to have his server configured such that the full URL is required. printf "gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/servers/\r\n"|socat - ssl:gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 Other gemini servers on the list do not have that restriction.
kybernetikos 6y ago
The irony of posting this link, when for me the site doesn't even work because techcrunch.com redirects via guce.advertising.com which doesn't dns resolve. It's annoying, but it's not too bad, because after having looked at their deceptive, user-hostile (and in my opinion illegal in the EU) practices, I'm pretty resigned to never going to another oath/guce site again. It's sites like techcrunch and their siblings that are breaking the internet.
- ultrarunner 6y ago
  I thought it was pretty ironic that an article about fixing the internet was on a site that broke my back button.
- s_gourichon 6y ago
  Feels ironic, could be considered "meta", that the link goes to techcrunch and my screen shows: > uMatrix has prevented the following page from loading: > https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=.. https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=... Yes, there is a dire need for fixing the Internet. Oh, by the way, remember, when fixing the Internet tools and protocols... The following sentence was written thinking of aircraft hull design, isn't a browser some kind of "netcraft" that has become too complicated and needs a redesign? "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." (Antoine de Saint Exupéry)
reggieband 6y ago
This is completely tangental but I think it is wrong to see the internet as needing another feature in order to be complete. I think we really need a ground up re-think of data. I remember diligently cataloging my movie preferences in LoveFilm, a UK Netflix competitor (when Netflix was a movie-by-mail company). I think I rated thousands of movies. I did the same in Netflix, certainly hundreds of films before they changed their rating scheme to thumbs up and "preference rating". Yet I have no access to this data. We often talk about how much companies know about us. Google knows what search terms I search for. Facebook knows what content I slow down on while scrolling my feed. Youtube knows what videos I watch. My cell phone company probably knows the location of my cell every minute of the day. And outside of the horrible interfaces they have been regulated to provide me access to that data ... it is almost completely opaque to me. Re-thinking data isn't the kind of thing a startup can do. I think we need to find legal mechanisms to really force companies to make data available to the originators of that data. IMO, that is the only way we salvage the Internet.
- na85 6y ago
  >Re-thinking data isn't the kind of thing a startup can do. I think we need to find legal mechanisms to really force companies to make data available to the originators of that data. IMO, that is the only way we salvage the Internet. You are completely correct, but unfortunately it's not fun and quite frustrating to work with government, and you're competing with lobbyists that Facebook and Google have a financial interest in supporting. It's a lot easier and more glamorous to just throw some JavaScript at the low-hanging fruit.
- modwilliam 6y ago
  You can download your data from Google and Facebook
- saurik 6y ago
  (As someone who did the same with Netflix and was really devastated they changed their UI there, you can at least go to your rating history and they still--last time I checked--give you the old ratings in their old format, so you can scrape that page and then have not lost your rating effort. I don't say this to in any way disagree with you: just to try to help a fellow ratings-keeper.)
nixpulvis 6y ago
Can someone please sue Apple for anti-trust violations on the grounds that forcing me to copy and paste all my fucking links instead of setting a default browser on iOS is a direct attack on health competition in the web browser space?! The fact that this issue has gone unresolved for this many years is completely unacceptable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ohyeshedid 6y ago
  While you're waiting for someone to do that, you could always stop giving them your money, time, and attention; stop using their products.
  - nixpulvis 6y ago
    Working on it... it's not quite so simple though. I did however quit working for them, despite the promise of a nice desk in the space ship. Apple is in no way the worst offender, but they are in many ways the largest. With great prominence comes great indifference it seems. How can anyone defend the decline in quality Apple's entire line has suffered in the past years. Qualities that enabled my personal development as a software engineer, creative hobbyist, and overall human being are now trashed like yesterdays news. Ideas critical to the foundation of the industry, now forgotten or unlearned. I'm becoming desperate for action, but remain paralyzed by the scope. Please forgive me for not throwing away my iPhone sooner.
    - ohyeshedid 6y ago
      It definitely doesn't help that there's really only one other ecosystem for smartphones, currently. I think we're probably all desperate for action and paralyzed by the scope, in a number of ways. Don't beat yourself up about it, there's only so much control you have over the situation. What I suggested is not simple, but it is possible and may be the only control you have in the end.
kylek 6y ago
I think the conversation needs to change a bit. People just don't care in the current state. I've been toying with the idea of calling all this (seo/ads/blogspam/content marketing and the auto-twitter-bot-ira-shill-to-cause-controversy-and-mass-media-parroting-it-feedback-loop) "internet pollution" in order to get average joes to think about it differently.
saadalem 6y ago
Here are some thoughts from Walter Isaacson https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-broken-starting-from-scratch-heres-how-id-fix-isaacson https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-broken-starting-from... : My big idea is that we have to fix the internet. After forty years, it has begun to corrode, both itself and us. It is still a marvelous and miraculous invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation, bats in the belfry, and trolls in the basement. I do not mean this to be one of those technophobic rants dissing the Internet for rewiring our brains to give us the twitchy attention span of Donald Trump on Twitter or pontificating about how we have to log off and smell the flowers. Those qualms about new technologies have existed ever since Plato fretted that the technology of writing would threaten memorization and oratory. I love the internet and all of its digital offshoots. What I bemoan is its decline. There is a bug in its original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet. Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content. All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously. For years, the benefits of anonymity on the Net outweighed its drawbacks. People felt more free to express themselves, which was especially valuable if they were dissidents or hiding a personal secret. This was celebrated in the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Now the problem is nobody can tell if you’re a troll. Or a hacker. Or a bot. Or a Macedonian teenager publishing a story that the Pope has endorsed Trump. This has poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying, and made email a risk. Its inherent lack of security has allowed Russian actors to screw with our democratic process. The lack of secure identification and authentication inherent in the internet’s genetic code has also prevented easy transactions, thwarted financial inclusion, destroyed the business models of content creators, unleashed deluges of spam, and forced us to use passwords and two-factor authentication schemes that would have baffled Houdini. The trillions being spent and the IQ points of computer science talent being allocated to tackle security issues makes it a drag, rather than a spur, to productivity in some sectors. In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has proven him correct. The Web is no longer a place of community, no longer an agora. Every day more sites are eliminating comments sections. If we could start from scratch, here’s what I think we would do: Create a system that enables content producers to negotiate with aggregators and search engines to get a royalty whenever their content is used, like ASCAP has negotiated for public performances and radio airings of its members’ works. Embed a simple digital wallet and currency for quick and easy small payments for songs, blogs, articles, and whatever other digital content is for sale. Encode emails with an authenticated return or originating address. Enforce critical properties and security at the lowest levels of the system possible, such as in the hardware or in the programming language, instead of leaving it to programmers to incorporate security into every line of code they write. Build chips and machines that update the notion of an internet packet. For those who want, their packets could be encoded or tagged with metadata that describe what they contain and give the rules for how it can be used. Most internet engineers think that these reforms are possible, from Vint Cerf, the original TCP/IP coauthor, to Milo Medin of Google, to Howard Shrobe, the director of cybersecurity at MIT. “We don’t need to live in cyber hell,” Shrobe has argued. Implementing them is less a matter of technology than of cost and social will. Some people, understandably, will resist any diminution of anonymity, which they sometimes label privacy. So the best approach, I think, would be to try to create a voluntary system, for those who want to use it, to have verified identification and authentication. People would not be forced to use such a system. If they wanted to communicate and surf anonymously, they could. But those of us who choose, at times, not to be anonymous and not to deal with people who are anonymous should have that right as well. That’s the way it works in the real world. The benefits would be many: Easy and secure ways to deal with your finances and medical records. Small payment systems that could reward valued content rather than the current incentive to concentrate on clickbait for advertising. Less hacking, spamming, cyberbullying, trolling, and the spewing of anonymous hate. And the possibility of a more civil discourse.
karlicoss 6y ago
I don't need money and not interested in founding a startup, but I've been working on fixing the internet at least for myself, in particular, browser history. Have a working app & extension. Anyone wants to take my idea? https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia
- lightninglu10 6y ago
  This is really cool!
userbinator 6y ago
How to "fix the internet"? Stop advocating for JS-heavy/required sites (including SPAs) whose use requires browsers that depend on a massively complex specification that can only be implemented fully by a huge organisation, and advocate the subset of HTML that would be usable from nearly any browser --- even one that any reasonably skilled developer could write him/herself --- and the highly accessible and user-friendly "internet as a hyperlinked web of documents" which it was envisioned to be. To try to "fix the internet" in a commercial way just feels a little awkward.
- pedrogpimenta 6y ago
  Nothing about that is inherently bad. It leads to bad behaviour, but in and of itself it's not bad. Also, saying that only a big corporation can provide a browser is both the nature of things and a lie. There are hugely complex programs built by "the community" (VLC to give an example). I want a better internet but I don't want to go back to the past.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    There are hugely complex programs built by "the community" (VLC to give an example). The complexity of a browser and the complexity of a media player are extremely different. To make a huge generalisation, the latter is far more maths-heavy and less interactive. I have played around with writing decoders for a few codecs, and to a first approximation, they are very similar, so it's not hard to see how something like VLC was created. Media formats are also relatively stable, it's not like a new one comes out every few months. On the other hand, the modern browser has many different components that a very wide breadth of knowledge is necessary, and on top of that, companies like Google are paying a great many people to do what appears to simply be churning the "standards" and continuously increasing their complexity, making it harder for others to even keep up. They invented the absurd oxymoron "living standard". Their common euphemism for that is "pushing the web forward". The great diversity of media players vs. the effective monopoly of browser(s) already shows this huge difference.
- zzo38computer 6y ago
  "Stop advocating for JS-heavy/required sites (including SPAs) whose use requires browsers that depend on a massively complex specification that can only be implemented fully by a huge organisation, and advocate the subset of HTML that would be usable from nearly any browser --- even one that any reasonably skilled developer could write him/herself" ...... Yes, I agree. (There is occasionally a use for such things, but it should be avoided as much as possible.) Furthermore, web browsers need to be fixed too, to give the user enough ropes to hang themself and also a few more just in case, and to block commands coming from the server. Furthermore, web browser should be deprecated for many things. There is such thing as Telnet, SSH, NNTP, IRC, etc, that can be in use, that should be encouraged to be in use. Furthermore, you could host stuff on your own computer if necessary. I also like the idea (mentioned in another comment) to call much of the mess as "internet pollution". Yes, these ads, scripts, etc, wastes bandwidth, so it is "internet pollution".
brainless 6y ago
What is "fix-the-internet"? I am going through Patrick's post here, and the website but still really no clue what is "fix-the-internet"? Wordpress, DDG, Kickstarter have very different purposes. If the definition is so broad then I could surely fall into it. How does one know?
brainless 6y ago
I find it funny that Mozilla mentions GitHub on the top messaging but I think GitLab fits better. Saying this even as an active GitHub user.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
I think alt open-source smartphone operating systems like PostmarketOS, PureOS, UBPorts would be a great candidate for this. The need to breach the duopoly in mobile smartphone ecosystem is now greater than ever if we need to protect the future of mobile computing and the data(lifestyle) of individuals using it; considering smartphone is the first computer for ~ > half of world population.
majewsky 6y ago
About that prison call thing: My understanding of these prison calling companies in the US is that they give a split of the revenue to prison administrators. If that's true, prison admins wouldn't have an incentive to switch to the free system. Can someone confirm or deny that?

386 points by cpeterso 6y ago

kristopolous 6y ago

I missed this... Is there still an opportunity, anyone know?

lightninglu10 6y ago
hey @kristopolous! yes we are JUST starting our new summer program. Applications are due June 5th. https://builders.mozilla.community/ https://builders.mozilla.community/ LMK if you have any questions!
- astlouis44 6y ago
  Hey, so our startup is building the future of games and interactive applications in the browser using WebAssembly. Definitely going to apply!
- kristopolous 6y ago
  Great! thanks.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

noads 6y ago

This seems somewhat myopic. I get that the culture of the valley is very entrepreneurial and the solution to every problem seems to be another free market competitor, but even if you buy into that ethos completely you have to see how this will fail. The tech giants are now trillion dollar companies. Soon to be multi-trillion dollar companies. They have all the data, because they own all the platforms. They have bent the very protocols the internet is built on to their needs. They can see good ideas or dangerous competitors coming before the competitors themselves even realize what they're onto. There is little to no innovation left at these tech giants, they simple acquire and shut down anything that might turn into a real problem for them. You cannot startup your way out of this quagmire. We need massive government intervention and a breakup of the tech giants, with strong new antitrust rules around future acquisitions. We simply cannot grow or innovate our way out of problems until that happens. Showing your carbon footprint of Amazon purchases is cute and will give you a ton of stuff to virtue signal about at the right cocktail parties, but ultimately it's completely meaningless. You're not changing the internet, you're not changing Amazon with token projects like this.

lightninglu10 6y ago

Hey all, Patrick here & one of the mentors for the Mozilla Builders "fix-the-internet" incubator https://builders.mozilla.community/ https://builders.mozilla.community/. We have 3 different offerings for this Summer. All incubator style, meaning you meet weekly or biweekly with mentors and we really try to help drive you from point A to point C. 1. $75k investment in a startup. MUST be serious about wanting to build something awesome and put in the hard work it takes to do so. 2. $16k funding in a much earlier stage project (idea stage / MVP stage). MUST be serious about commitment it takes to get to launch. 3. OPEN LABS: these are open to the entire community and you have access to the mentors. 10 min checkins each week & peer sessions. We've had TONS of amazing projects for our Open Labs in the Spring and we hope to see TONS more for the Summer. In terms of MISSION and what we're looking for: We started this new incubator out of Mozilla in order to work with & invest in developers, startups, and technology enthusiasts who are building things that will shape the internet and have a positive impact without needing to hyper focus on the bottom line. We call this our ”fix-the-internet” incubator.

deleted 6y ago
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cousin_it 6y ago
Here's my "fix the internet" idea: build a search engine that is itself ad-free, and searches over only the ad-free segment of the web. More options: allow users to exclude sites with ads, sites with ecommerce, sites with tracking, or simply allow users to build and share lists of sites to exclude. Rationale: the unmonetized or under-monetized web was awesome, a lot of it still exists under the radar now, and it would be good to reify it as a tangible thing. Bonus 1: competitors probably won't copy your features. Bonus 2: spam won't be a big problem, as most of it contains ads.
- duxup 6y ago
  Is there enough content where searching just the ad-free segment is ... worth it? What happens if you're a top result on the add free segment and you start incurring some level of costs? Do you drop off if you add an ad? Granted I really like the idea, I'd love to see it tried, but I wonder what all the unintended consequences would be / skeptical of the value of segregating "ad-free" vs. "has an ad of any sort" vs. the sites that really are a mess.

hartator 6y ago

I thought Mozilla was a non-profit fundation?

jameslk 6y ago
I'd assume this is offered by Mozilla's corporate side https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
est31 6y ago
There is Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation. The foundation owns the corporation.
- fabrice_d 6y ago
  Mitchel is now the CEO of Mozilla Corp (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-named-ceo-of-mozilla/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-name...)
  - est31 6y ago
    Thanks for pointing it out. Seems she's also still foundation chair so the two can't be differentiated by their leadership. I've edited my comment to remove the mentions.

gonational 6y ago

Real talk, Mozilla; would you be interested in funding a privacy-oriented fork of Firefox with all the unnecessary extras (Pocket, etc.) stripped out? I’m thinking something just like Firefox, except unencumbered by Google or other corporate affiliations, etc. I think this would be the best first step towards any kind of “fixing the Internet”.

snazz 6y ago
This would benefit the couple of people who use that fork of Firefox, but would have no effect on every other Internet user. It's impossible for Mozilla to fund anything "unencumbered by Google or other corporate affiliations" when so much of their money comes from Google.
deleted 6y ago
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mmayo 6y ago
I'm not really speaking for "Mozilla" because what does that even mean? But as one of the folks doing this summer program for Mozilla, I can say 100% we'd be excited to see a good application around this. There's a bunch of great browsers out there, most based on Chromium, but we're all pretty tied up with search as the only way to fund. Brave's made a step away from that, which is cool. I'd love to see more attempts at browsers with different funding models. If you have an idea and at least, say, the beginnings of a small team who could execute, we're available to provide feedback before you submit an application. thx!
gkoberger 6y ago
It's tough. People at Mozilla care so much about privacy, to the point that (when I worked there 2010-2012), they refused to do "services" the same way Google did (aka a login and a central server). So as a result, Chrome "just worked" and Firefox was completely unusable. The people at Mozilla really care about privacy. But they also have to build something people can actually use. That means finding a balance between privacy and usability. To you it's "fixing the Internet", but to most normal people it's "removing features." Like, can you imagine explaining to the average user why they can't just type a search into the address bar and get Google results? (More specifically, though, what would you strip? Pocket is owned by Mozilla and is just a fancy bookmark manager, but sure. Google is just a default search; data isn't being sent to them. Outside of those, what would you remove?)

Stoner 6y ago

Hey everyone, my team is in Mozilla's ”fix-the-internet” MVP Lab right now. We're working on Vngle, a decentralized grassroots news network combatting news deserts across America. We're working in Georgia now and will be moving to other states soon. Sign up to stay updated at Vngle.com or follow us on social @VngleStories. https://www.instagram.com/VngleStories/ https://www.instagram.com/VngleStories/

ckolkey 6y ago
Really trying to be constructive here: consider investing in one or two more vowels. The "vn" is...rough.
- sjroot 6y ago
  Looks to be a play on the word “Angle” - in the context of news, this is the point you’re trying to convince your readers of. “What’s your angle?”
  - brobinson 6y ago
    I pronounced it in my head as "vungle"...
    - saurik 6y ago
      I went with "vingle".
cameronhowe 6y ago
"Fix the internet" then links your instagram. Seems like you are part of the problem? Edit: Or maybe I have a very different view of what fixing the internet means. The peertube content sponsoring currently on the frontpage seems much more constructive to me.
- brainless 6y ago
  I totally agree with this. If the internet needs a fix, it is about getting off the big players. Getting off this constant feed of nonsense. Being more personal, more one-to-one instead of "hey look at my feed, it has 2 million mindless people looking at it right now".

detaro 6y ago

previous post by mozilla employees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232

Causality1 6y ago

I thought Mozilla was already on financial life support itself. How do they have money for this?

hu3 6y ago
Don't they get half a billion per year from Google?

seemslegit 6y ago

Like everything that Mozilla did for the last decade or so this is far more likely to produce false choices than actual alternatives.

gambler 6y ago

>Developers in a variety of domains were invited to apply, as long as they fit the themes of empowerment, privacy, decentralization, community and so on. Funny. I'm seeing how the Web is being fucked over in exactly these areas, and yet I don't see Mozilla doing anything to stop it. Quite the opposite, they contribute to it and follow Google's lead on most of the issues. Here is the simplest and incredibly impactful user empowerment idea. Assume I have a computer with Firefox and an internet connection. Can I open the browser, press "make a web page" button and create a page with a stable URL (probably a GUID) accessible to other people? Without creating an account some or doing some nerdy shit. Nope. Well, the fact that this basic idea still isn't implemented in the age of "cloud computing" tells you everything you need to know about whether major player in the market (which Mozilla will soon cease to be) want to empower their users.

DevKoala 6y ago
Who will host the webpage in your scenario?
- gambler 6y ago
  Really, this is the question I'm being asked on Hacker News? Are we at the point where an average user here never heard of BitTorrent, Tor and other similar systems? Or is it a way to demand for me to post a complete description of the protocol that would support the feature above? It doesn't matter what the specific protocol is. What matters is that this is not even a goal and it should be.
  - DevKoala 6y ago
    Yes, I am interested in your idea. I agree it is something should happen. However, who would host these sites? I don’t see the solution yet. Maybe you have put more thought into it. Edit: you sound a bit rattled. I didn’t mean to instigate.
  - notriddle 6y ago
    > Are we at the point where an average user here never heard of BitTorrent, Tor and other similar systems? Tor hidden services don't provide permanent storage. It's just a routing protocol. BitTorrent doesn't guarantee storage, either. A popular site will remain de facto stable, but the long tail is a different story. Every. Single. Time. This idea comes up, and it always fails because the economics just don't work out. Someone needs to take care of all those terabytes of data. Routing is pretty cheap, and can basically be thought of as solved by Tor, I2P, IPFS, BitTorrent, etc. If you're willing to keep your PC on 24/7, it's easy, but nobody can expect that. The closest you can get is FreeNet. Kinda. It's better than BitTorrent, but still worse than S3, because of course it is, it's free.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising. In the beginning there were rules. No commercial use. When that was lifted we started the descent into where things are now. It began with a lawyer posting an ad about immigration services to Usenet. It has come a long way since then. All the while, the web browser has supported always advertising, making it easier and easier to consume ads, buy and sell via the web. People in the 1990's who wanted "e-commerce" got their wish. Certain companies and individuals have become wealthy beyond imagination. Companies are hording cash. However it is not an equal playing field. Governments have heretofore been unwilling to regulate. Some, those who are proifiting from the status quo, might say this is starting to change. Even if this is true, the change is very slow. In Mozilla Corporation's domicile, there has been no significant change. Mozilla is funded indirectly by advertising. Their funding comes from Google. Google's funding comes from advertisers.

naasking 6y ago
> The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising. Regulation always requires coordination, which is simply not possible at internet scale. Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms, and you're talking about regulation at an even larger scale against strong interests with large financial reserves. What's needed is a secure/private by default browser sandbox so these interests have no say in how their content is consumed. Take a look the extremes Gemini has gone to ensure privacy [1]. Some of those can be relaxed without compromising privacy much, but a serious effort along those lines is what's actually needed. [1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  HTTP printf "GET /gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/servers/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: portal.mozz.us\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n"|socat - ssl:portal.mozz.us:443 Gemini printf "/servers\r\n"|socat - gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 However, he seems to have his server configured such that the full URL is required. printf "gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/servers/\r\n"|socat - ssl:gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 Other gemini servers on the list do not have that restriction.

kybernetikos 6y ago

The irony of posting this link, when for me the site doesn't even work because techcrunch.com redirects via guce.advertising.com which doesn't dns resolve. It's annoying, but it's not too bad, because after having looked at their deceptive, user-hostile (and in my opinion illegal in the EU) practices, I'm pretty resigned to never going to another oath/guce site again. It's sites like techcrunch and their siblings that are breaking the internet.

ultrarunner 6y ago
I thought it was pretty ironic that an article about fixing the internet was on a site that broke my back button.
s_gourichon 6y ago
Feels ironic, could be considered "meta", that the link goes to techcrunch and my screen shows: > uMatrix has prevented the following page from loading: > https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=.. https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=... Yes, there is a dire need for fixing the Internet. Oh, by the way, remember, when fixing the Internet tools and protocols... The following sentence was written thinking of aircraft hull design, isn't a browser some kind of "netcraft" that has become too complicated and needs a redesign? "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." (Antoine de Saint Exupéry)

reggieband 6y ago

This is completely tangental but I think it is wrong to see the internet as needing another feature in order to be complete. I think we really need a ground up re-think of data. I remember diligently cataloging my movie preferences in LoveFilm, a UK Netflix competitor (when Netflix was a movie-by-mail company). I think I rated thousands of movies. I did the same in Netflix, certainly hundreds of films before they changed their rating scheme to thumbs up and "preference rating". Yet I have no access to this data. We often talk about how much companies know about us. Google knows what search terms I search for. Facebook knows what content I slow down on while scrolling my feed. Youtube knows what videos I watch. My cell phone company probably knows the location of my cell every minute of the day. And outside of the horrible interfaces they have been regulated to provide me access to that data ... it is almost completely opaque to me. Re-thinking data isn't the kind of thing a startup can do. I think we need to find legal mechanisms to really force companies to make data available to the originators of that data. IMO, that is the only way we salvage the Internet.

na85 6y ago
>Re-thinking data isn't the kind of thing a startup can do. I think we need to find legal mechanisms to really force companies to make data available to the originators of that data. IMO, that is the only way we salvage the Internet. You are completely correct, but unfortunately it's not fun and quite frustrating to work with government, and you're competing with lobbyists that Facebook and Google have a financial interest in supporting. It's a lot easier and more glamorous to just throw some JavaScript at the low-hanging fruit.
modwilliam 6y ago
You can download your data from Google and Facebook
saurik 6y ago
(As someone who did the same with Netflix and was really devastated they changed their UI there, you can at least go to your rating history and they still--last time I checked--give you the old ratings in their old format, so you can scrape that page and then have not lost your rating effort. I don't say this to in any way disagree with you: just to try to help a fellow ratings-keeper.)

nixpulvis 6y ago

Can someone please sue Apple for anti-trust violations on the grounds that forcing me to copy and paste all my fucking links instead of setting a default browser on iOS is a direct attack on health competition in the web browser space?! The fact that this issue has gone unresolved for this many years is completely unacceptable.

deleted 6y ago
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ohyeshedid 6y ago
While you're waiting for someone to do that, you could always stop giving them your money, time, and attention; stop using their products.
- nixpulvis 6y ago
  Working on it... it's not quite so simple though. I did however quit working for them, despite the promise of a nice desk in the space ship. Apple is in no way the worst offender, but they are in many ways the largest. With great prominence comes great indifference it seems. How can anyone defend the decline in quality Apple's entire line has suffered in the past years. Qualities that enabled my personal development as a software engineer, creative hobbyist, and overall human being are now trashed like yesterdays news. Ideas critical to the foundation of the industry, now forgotten or unlearned. I'm becoming desperate for action, but remain paralyzed by the scope. Please forgive me for not throwing away my iPhone sooner.
  - ohyeshedid 6y ago
    It definitely doesn't help that there's really only one other ecosystem for smartphones, currently. I think we're probably all desperate for action and paralyzed by the scope, in a number of ways. Don't beat yourself up about it, there's only so much control you have over the situation. What I suggested is not simple, but it is possible and may be the only control you have in the end.

kylek 6y ago

I think the conversation needs to change a bit. People just don't care in the current state. I've been toying with the idea of calling all this (seo/ads/blogspam/content marketing and the auto-twitter-bot-ira-shill-to-cause-controversy-and-mass-media-parroting-it-feedback-loop) "internet pollution" in order to get average joes to think about it differently.

saadalem 6y ago

Here are some thoughts from Walter Isaacson https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-broken-starting-from-scratch-heres-how-id-fix-isaacson https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-broken-starting-from... : My big idea is that we have to fix the internet. After forty years, it has begun to corrode, both itself and us. It is still a marvelous and miraculous invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation, bats in the belfry, and trolls in the basement. I do not mean this to be one of those technophobic rants dissing the Internet for rewiring our brains to give us the twitchy attention span of Donald Trump on Twitter or pontificating about how we have to log off and smell the flowers. Those qualms about new technologies have existed ever since Plato fretted that the technology of writing would threaten memorization and oratory. I love the internet and all of its digital offshoots. What I bemoan is its decline. There is a bug in its original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet. Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content. All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously. For years, the benefits of anonymity on the Net outweighed its drawbacks. People felt more free to express themselves, which was especially valuable if they were dissidents or hiding a personal secret. This was celebrated in the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Now the problem is nobody can tell if you’re a troll. Or a hacker. Or a bot. Or a Macedonian teenager publishing a story that the Pope has endorsed Trump. This has poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying, and made email a risk. Its inherent lack of security has allowed Russian actors to screw with our democratic process. The lack of secure identification and authentication inherent in the internet’s genetic code has also prevented easy transactions, thwarted financial inclusion, destroyed the business models of content creators, unleashed deluges of spam, and forced us to use passwords and two-factor authentication schemes that would have baffled Houdini. The trillions being spent and the IQ points of computer science talent being allocated to tackle security issues makes it a drag, rather than a spur, to productivity in some sectors. In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has proven him correct. The Web is no longer a place of community, no longer an agora. Every day more sites are eliminating comments sections. If we could start from scratch, here’s what I think we would do: Create a system that enables content producers to negotiate with aggregators and search engines to get a royalty whenever their content is used, like ASCAP has negotiated for public performances and radio airings of its members’ works. Embed a simple digital wallet and currency for quick and easy small payments for songs, blogs, articles, and whatever other digital content is for sale. Encode emails with an authenticated return or originating address. Enforce critical properties and security at the lowest levels of the system possible, such as in the hardware or in the programming language, instead of leaving it to programmers to incorporate security into every line of code they write. Build chips and machines that update the notion of an internet packet. For those who want, their packets could be encoded or tagged with metadata that describe what they contain and give the rules for how it can be used. Most internet engineers think that these reforms are possible, from Vint Cerf, the original TCP/IP coauthor, to Milo Medin of Google, to Howard Shrobe, the director of cybersecurity at MIT. “We don’t need to live in cyber hell,” Shrobe has argued. Implementing them is less a matter of technology than of cost and social will. Some people, understandably, will resist any diminution of anonymity, which they sometimes label privacy. So the best approach, I think, would be to try to create a voluntary system, for those who want to use it, to have verified identification and authentication. People would not be forced to use such a system. If they wanted to communicate and surf anonymously, they could. But those of us who choose, at times, not to be anonymous and not to deal with people who are anonymous should have that right as well. That’s the way it works in the real world. The benefits would be many: Easy and secure ways to deal with your finances and medical records. Small payment systems that could reward valued content rather than the current incentive to concentrate on clickbait for advertising. Less hacking, spamming, cyberbullying, trolling, and the spewing of anonymous hate. And the possibility of a more civil discourse.

karlicoss 6y ago

I don't need money and not interested in founding a startup, but I've been working on fixing the internet at least for myself, in particular, browser history. Have a working app & extension. Anyone wants to take my idea? https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia

lightninglu10 6y ago
This is really cool!

userbinator 6y ago

How to "fix the internet"? Stop advocating for JS-heavy/required sites (including SPAs) whose use requires browsers that depend on a massively complex specification that can only be implemented fully by a huge organisation, and advocate the subset of HTML that would be usable from nearly any browser --- even one that any reasonably skilled developer could write him/herself --- and the highly accessible and user-friendly "internet as a hyperlinked web of documents" which it was envisioned to be. To try to "fix the internet" in a commercial way just feels a little awkward.

pedrogpimenta 6y ago
Nothing about that is inherently bad. It leads to bad behaviour, but in and of itself it's not bad. Also, saying that only a big corporation can provide a browser is both the nature of things and a lie. There are hugely complex programs built by "the community" (VLC to give an example). I want a better internet but I don't want to go back to the past.
- userbinator 6y ago
  There are hugely complex programs built by "the community" (VLC to give an example). The complexity of a browser and the complexity of a media player are extremely different. To make a huge generalisation, the latter is far more maths-heavy and less interactive. I have played around with writing decoders for a few codecs, and to a first approximation, they are very similar, so it's not hard to see how something like VLC was created. Media formats are also relatively stable, it's not like a new one comes out every few months. On the other hand, the modern browser has many different components that a very wide breadth of knowledge is necessary, and on top of that, companies like Google are paying a great many people to do what appears to simply be churning the "standards" and continuously increasing their complexity, making it harder for others to even keep up. They invented the absurd oxymoron "living standard". Their common euphemism for that is "pushing the web forward". The great diversity of media players vs. the effective monopoly of browser(s) already shows this huge difference.
zzo38computer 6y ago
"Stop advocating for JS-heavy/required sites (including SPAs) whose use requires browsers that depend on a massively complex specification that can only be implemented fully by a huge organisation, and advocate the subset of HTML that would be usable from nearly any browser --- even one that any reasonably skilled developer could write him/herself" ...... Yes, I agree. (There is occasionally a use for such things, but it should be avoided as much as possible.) Furthermore, web browsers need to be fixed too, to give the user enough ropes to hang themself and also a few more just in case, and to block commands coming from the server. Furthermore, web browser should be deprecated for many things. There is such thing as Telnet, SSH, NNTP, IRC, etc, that can be in use, that should be encouraged to be in use. Furthermore, you could host stuff on your own computer if necessary. I also like the idea (mentioned in another comment) to call much of the mess as "internet pollution". Yes, these ads, scripts, etc, wastes bandwidth, so it is "internet pollution".

brainless 6y ago

What is "fix-the-internet"? I am going through Patrick's post here, and the website but still really no clue what is "fix-the-internet"? Wordpress, DDG, Kickstarter have very different purposes. If the definition is so broad then I could surely fall into it. How does one know?

brainless 6y ago

I find it funny that Mozilla mentions GitHub on the top messaging but I think GitLab fits better. Saying this even as an active GitHub user.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

I think alt open-source smartphone operating systems like PostmarketOS, PureOS, UBPorts would be a great candidate for this. The need to breach the duopoly in mobile smartphone ecosystem is now greater than ever if we need to protect the future of mobile computing and the data(lifestyle) of individuals using it; considering smartphone is the first computer for ~ > half of world population.

majewsky 6y ago

About that prison call thing: My understanding of these prison calling companies in the US is that they give a split of the revenue to prison administrators. If that's true, prison admins wouldn't have an incentive to switch to the free system. Can someone confirm or deny that?