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Hey all, Patrick here & one of the mentors for the Mozilla Builders "fix-the-internet" incubator https://builders.mozilla.community/ https://builders.mozilla.co

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.
  - eloisius 6y ago
    The add-free segment of the internet does indeed sound like a niche market. I wonder if quality of results could be drastically improved by just penalizing domains that contain a lot of referral links and ads. I remember the days when it felt like you could learn anything by searching the web a bit until you found some suitable content to read. Now it's like sifting through reams of affiliate spam that I have to at least skim before I can tell that it's low quality garbage.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- Max_aaa 6y ago
  How would the project sustain itself? (Hardware and hosting costs)
  - ShamelessC 6y ago
    I'd honestly appreciate this enough to pay a subscription for it if there was a policy that meant the subscription fee was explicitly to avoid needing revenue from shady business. I believe fastmail is like that.
  - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
    Begging and government grants, like Wikipedia?
    - pkaye 6y ago
      So why doesn't Mozilla go for government grants instead of getting money promoting Google Search?
  - hawski 6y ago
    There would be drastically less content and the whole operation could be easier, because you probably don't have to worry so much about spam websites. That would keep it low cost already, not single DigitalOcean droplet cheap, but I think it could be sustained from a programmers pocket initially. Donations/patreon for one, then subscriptions. It should be possible to offer a contentless index for download (I estimate it could be around 50-200GB) and that could be a paid option.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
  - mlacks 6y ago
    this is such a therapeutic way to internet surf. No distractions - just content. thank you so much
  - myu701 6y ago
    Added to my FF search. wonderful.
  - cousin_it 6y ago
    Very cool! Though it seems more like a hand-picked directory than a search engine with a crawler, as it doesn't find quite a few good noncommercial pages that I know exist.
    - burkaman 6y ago
      Looks like pages have to be submitted here to be included: https://wiby.me/submit/ https://wiby.me/submit/
    - armyofbots 6y ago
      I think humans are better at building such a thing if the aim is not gobbling up the entire web but only light websites that aren't commercial. I think that would be hard or impossible to automate. It definitely has an early 90's vibe in terms of results. Not terribly useful be but interesting nonetheless.
  - tylerchilds 6y ago
    1. cool. 2. the purple for the links makes me think i've already clicked and seen everything
  - armyofbots 6y ago
    thank you for posting this, I've spent the last hour pressing surprise me
- chris_f 6y ago
  I launched a new search engine a few months ago and have been looking at several alternative ways to fund it, but none of them seem to be a viable path. The best balance of privacy and user experience seems to be display ads related to search term context that don't do any tracking (like billboards in the real world). But even that isn't an easy proposition and will need a custom network built to generate those type of ads. A lot of people say they will pay for a search engine, but it is such a small niche that I believe the cost would be prohibitively expensive, and the search engine would probably still be subpar to Google in many respect. Would you pay $10/month, what about $29? Those are most likely where the monthly fees would have to be for this type of product.
  - calvinmorrison 6y ago
    I would love a search engine that had a -ecommerce option. Sometimes I want to buy shocks for a f150, sometimes I want to see how to replace it. What i don't want is to wade through all the ecom sites.
    - dhimes 6y ago
      This is exactly it. And I could fill in my own profile that I share. And when the switch is on the search engine would have access to it to filter ads and allow marketers to target me properly.
    - freediver 6y ago
      Can you point to a site that has f150 shocks replacement information that it not commercial in nature? (no product sales/ads/newsletters/affiliate links) I am very curious and have a hard time finding one.
  - chrsm 6y ago
    I used to work for an ad network (BSA, Carbon Ads, etc) that does not intrusively track and believes in the effectiveness of quality one-ad-per-page. Try contacting @toddo on twitter or email me (in profile) and I'll forward it over. Anyhow, I'd love to see something like this. I've switched to DDG but often have to reach for Google if I can't find relevant results.
- totemandtoken 6y ago
  Not the exactly the same thing, but I had this idea for something I call "newsbetting." Basically, you get a de-titled article and have to bet as to whether it is a right-wing or left-wing biased source. The news source collects the transaction cost of the bet and the nonprofit platform is sustained through grants/donations. The goal was to provide an alternative revenue stream for news organizations which cuts out the need for ads entirely. I don't know if this idea could extend to other types of media but maybe there are ways, like sponsored vs non-sponsored content for tech news, replication prediction markets for scientific news, etc.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  Wouldn't an ad-free-only search result eventually prioritize for news/info sites that have other forms of sustenance outside of readership? Digital subscription rates have been rising, but not fast enough to subsist most publications without additional ad revenue. My concern is that such a search engine would allow private interests to create "news/media/info" sites directly that qualify while long-respected publications are ostracized. Great idea if the primary intent is to index other types of content outside of that sphere, but based on the history of the modern web I think we could expect that to be gamed pretty quickly in a detrimental way. Even just writing this comment I keep coming into thoughts and it's making me realize what an interesting subject of discussion it could be. There's a lot of questions in there!
- eevilspock 6y ago
  i would love to see a whole TLD that was ad-free. Or perhaps go one step further create a whole alternate name service so we can ditch corrupt ICANN while we're at it. Either way you'd want clear borders for this ad-free internet and be able to legally deport violators.
  - jjvens 6y ago
    There is already a custom OpenNIC TLD that serves this purpose: https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/dot/libre https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/dot/libre Unfortunately, it's only available through OpenNIC's DNS.
- hawski 6y ago
  That's an idea I had for a few years now. I started some motions [0], but progress was slow, because of life. I wanted to start with going through the Common Crawl [1] data at first for testing purposes and to calculate a rough percentage of sites being uBlock-Origin clean. I think that such sites would be in ballpark of a few ‰. That would enable me to offer the contentless index for download. With delta updates and torrent for distribution it could be not that expensive, but that's a thing that I could charge for. My intention is to use AdBlock rules like easylist to check whether or not indeed the page. My initial code is fine in Go, but I lost enthusiasm for Go lately and careerwise it's not a good fit for me (I don't have much time to learn something not as useful for me professionally). So I started to rewrite it in Rust, while learning it, you can laugh now (Rust Evangelism Strike Force el oh el). It has an advantage with ready to use rules parser from Brave [2] and presumably high quality tokenizer from html5ever [3]. I want to use a tokenizer instead of a full parser to be able to do stream processing bringing costs down. Common Crawl data lays on S3 so the processing must be done initially on EC2 to keep it low cost. [0] Current Go code: https://github.com/hadrianw/abracabra https://github.com/hadrianw/abracabra [1] https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/ [2] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust [3] https://docs.rs/html5ever/0.25.1/html5ever/tokenizer/index.html https://docs.rs/html5ever/0.25.1/html5ever/tokenizer/index.h... EDIT: Also for the search part I want to use something more stand alone than Elasticsearch to offer desktop search with downloaded index. When I started with Go I wanted to use Bleve [4], now I'm not sure, but I think that Bleve is getting mature enough. I will worry when I will have some data to search through. One of the challenges with this whole enterprise is a small need of JavaScript parsing. There is a common pattern, that for example Google Analytics uses, that uses a snippet of JavaScript to insert a proper script tag. But those snippets are very short so I think they may not need a full JS VM, maybe even a tokenizer would be good enough. Browser AdBlockers base on the site executing JavaScript already. [4] https://blevesearch.com/ https://blevesearch.com/
- 34679 6y ago
  I like your idea, it's along the same lines as something I've been thinking about. I call it "The Web at Large and the Filters of Reduction", shamelessly taken from Aldous Huxley's "Mind at Large and the Filters of Reduction". Huxley "The Doors of Perception" (1954): >each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and perceiving everything that is happening everwhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. We've all heard the comparisons between the brain and the internet. And we've all been overloaded at one point by the vast amounts of useless crap on the internet. So what about a site that allows users to customize their filters of reduction? You could have popular profiles premade and ready for tweaking, or you could go raw and witness an endless stream of information raked from all over.
_t0du 6y ago
I am not an expert, but 75k seems disproportionate from the effort and time the requirements seem to be looking for. For the lofty goal of "Fix the internet", 75k seems more like "An extra few weeks of runway." What am I missing?
- lightninglu10 6y ago
  Hey Alex, the $75k is just a start! We're funding projects who are just starting out / getting off the ground. Imagine you have a big vision to build something that betters the internet and you have only your life savings. Or you've been working on something for a while but haven't been able to put full effort into it. This $75k is to kickstart teams & projects in "fixing the internet".
  - alexbanks 6y ago
    Are there groups that have A.) A team assembled, B.) A product that's far enough along to have C.) Users, who 75 grand makes a meaningful impact? Is the expectation that those teams maintain other jobs while working with the incubator? ^ Probably a more succinct way to ask my question. I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to negatively paint the program, it's clearly more than most companies are doing to fix the internet. 75k is just the lowest amount of money I've seen with respect to incubators/funding (but again, I am not an expert).
    - lightninglu10 6y ago
      This is our first time running this Summer Incubator ($75k iteration), BUT we are in the middle of our Spring MVP Program. These teams each got around $8-10k. We have some really good projects from this much smaller program, including https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neutral/oagdejngkgbfnaankoehhanicaodcdpd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neutral/oagdejngkg... (Firefox extension releasing this week), https://ameelio.org/ https://ameelio.org/, and more! So we're not entirely sure whether $75k is the right amount or not, BUT we do know that with $10k, we've had some really impressive projects.
throwaway914892 6y ago
Where does the revenue come from if the focus isn't on making money? 75k may be a start, but it will only last a couple months at max. The better the ideas to fix the internet, the less they will generate revenue. So that's kind of a catch-22. It often takes years to build an idea, and tens of millions $.
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
how about supporting the guys from gemini and bring gemini support to FF? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23161922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23161922
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  the more I think about this the more I like its potential to actually "fix the internet": not just adding protocol support to gemini:// but have FF check first if the content can be fetched via gemini:// and if yes then default to using it instead. reader-view is great but you can't switch to it until all the crap has been already loaded. supporting gemini would increase privacy, and let the users decide if they prefer content with ads and bloat and malware or rather just read without distraction.
jameslk 6y ago
Sounds interesting. Any more detail on what Mozilla sees broken about the internet and what a company would be doing to fix it? Your link gives some example types of companies but doesn't really define the mission. "Positive impact" is completely subjective. I have ideas about what this is all about but would like to see it defined by Mozilla better.
- lightninglu10 6y ago
  Here's some more details on this: https://builders.mozilla.community/who-we-fund.html https://builders.mozilla.community/who-we-fund.html This is certainly not limiting and we know that there are more categories and just this, but it's a start.
  - jameslk 6y ago
    Thanks! That's a lot more specific and helpful
jka 6y ago
Hi Patrick! At the risk of this comment appearing as if it might derail conversation -- this really is not my intent (the iniatiative sounds great; I'm unable to find the details I'm looking for on the site) -- are these Mozilla programs open to participants/startups based outside the U.S.? Thanks!
- lightninglu10 6y ago
  yes! we already have teams from Asia, Africa, and Europe participating in Spring.
  - jka 6y ago
    Great to hear, thank you!
EGreg 6y ago
Hi Patrick. Thanks so much for linking this. This may be a stupid question but ... what are you looking for in the "affiliation" field in the Application? Just a bit of background. This was practically made for us. We've built a "Social Operating System for the Web", an open source platform that lets any organizations have their own Facebook-level online community as easily as they can have a blog with Wordpress. We have poured years into this, attracted 8 million users in over 95+ countries, and are definitely in it for the long haul. (https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform)
- lightninglu10 6y ago
  Hm, I thought we got that fixed up. Put the school you went to or the last company you worked at, if it still exists when you apply!
  - lightninglu10 6y ago
    Or just put Qbix
    - EGreg 6y ago
      Thanks, Patrick. That worked! This is exciting, I honestly feel our company was made for this, or perhaps vice versa. Either way, Mozilla's accelerator is the best fit for what we are doing :)
d1plo1d 6y ago
Hi Patrick, I've been prototyping end-to-end encrypted 3D printing over webRTC. Would decentralizing remote 3D printing fall under the banner of fixing the internet?
- lightninglu10 6y ago
  hard to tell over this short description. best thing to do is join our slack (https://join.slack.com/t/mozillabuilders/shared_invite/zt-el38cusg-~nHR7R8bJ0Gvat7C117P6w https://join.slack.com/t/mozillabuilders/shared_invite/zt-el...), and join for open office hours and see if you can get feedback from one of the mentors. regardless, you can def apply! no downsides.
  - d1plo1d 6y ago
    I'm always interested in feedback. Sounds worth it even for that tbh. Cheers!
badrabbit 6y ago
I have a good idea for literally replacing layers of the OSI model with new interoperable protocols that solve problems of authentication,latency,bandwidth waste and decentralization. But alas,not a single line of code written.
ngold 6y ago
Sounds fun. My brilliant idea. Go make a browser with the UBlock Origin guy. Since it's kind of a standard for safe browsing these day's.
gkanai 6y ago
Has there been a public review of the last incarnation of Mozilla's funding of non-Mozilla projects, Mozilla Labs and Mozilla WebFWD? I feel like an honest and open discussion around what went well and did not go well with the last time this was done from Mozilla should be a prerequisite to doing this again or the same mistakes could be made. https://www.mozillalabs.com/ https://www.mozillalabs.com/ https://www.mozillalabs.com/webfwd/ https://www.mozillalabs.com/webfwd/
cabalamat 6y ago
My fix-the-internet idea is MeowCat, a distributed microblogging / macroblogging / wiki / social networking platform that uses ActivityPub for distribution. It's at https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2 https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2 Is this the sort of thing Mozilla would be interested in?

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.
- eloisius 6y ago
  The add-free segment of the internet does indeed sound like a niche market. I wonder if quality of results could be drastically improved by just penalizing domains that contain a lot of referral links and ads. I remember the days when it felt like you could learn anything by searching the web a bit until you found some suitable content to read. Now it's like sifting through reams of affiliate spam that I have to at least skim before I can tell that it's low quality garbage.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Max_aaa 6y ago
How would the project sustain itself? (Hardware and hosting costs)
- ShamelessC 6y ago
  I'd honestly appreciate this enough to pay a subscription for it if there was a policy that meant the subscription fee was explicitly to avoid needing revenue from shady business. I believe fastmail is like that.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  Begging and government grants, like Wikipedia?
  - pkaye 6y ago
    So why doesn't Mozilla go for government grants instead of getting money promoting Google Search?
- hawski 6y ago
  There would be drastically less content and the whole operation could be easier, because you probably don't have to worry so much about spam websites. That would keep it low cost already, not single DigitalOcean droplet cheap, but I think it could be sustained from a programmers pocket initially. Donations/patreon for one, then subscriptions. It should be possible to offer a contentless index for download (I estimate it could be around 50-200GB) and that could be a paid option.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
- mlacks 6y ago
  this is such a therapeutic way to internet surf. No distractions - just content. thank you so much
- myu701 6y ago
  Added to my FF search. wonderful.
- cousin_it 6y ago
  Very cool! Though it seems more like a hand-picked directory than a search engine with a crawler, as it doesn't find quite a few good noncommercial pages that I know exist.
  - burkaman 6y ago
    Looks like pages have to be submitted here to be included: https://wiby.me/submit/ https://wiby.me/submit/
  - armyofbots 6y ago
    I think humans are better at building such a thing if the aim is not gobbling up the entire web but only light websites that aren't commercial. I think that would be hard or impossible to automate. It definitely has an early 90's vibe in terms of results. Not terribly useful be but interesting nonetheless.
- tylerchilds 6y ago
  1. cool. 2. the purple for the links makes me think i've already clicked and seen everything
- armyofbots 6y ago
  thank you for posting this, I've spent the last hour pressing surprise me
chris_f 6y ago
I launched a new search engine a few months ago and have been looking at several alternative ways to fund it, but none of them seem to be a viable path. The best balance of privacy and user experience seems to be display ads related to search term context that don't do any tracking (like billboards in the real world). But even that isn't an easy proposition and will need a custom network built to generate those type of ads. A lot of people say they will pay for a search engine, but it is such a small niche that I believe the cost would be prohibitively expensive, and the search engine would probably still be subpar to Google in many respect. Would you pay $10/month, what about $29? Those are most likely where the monthly fees would have to be for this type of product.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  I would love a search engine that had a -ecommerce option. Sometimes I want to buy shocks for a f150, sometimes I want to see how to replace it. What i don't want is to wade through all the ecom sites.
  - dhimes 6y ago
    This is exactly it. And I could fill in my own profile that I share. And when the switch is on the search engine would have access to it to filter ads and allow marketers to target me properly.
  - freediver 6y ago
    Can you point to a site that has f150 shocks replacement information that it not commercial in nature? (no product sales/ads/newsletters/affiliate links) I am very curious and have a hard time finding one.
- chrsm 6y ago
  I used to work for an ad network (BSA, Carbon Ads, etc) that does not intrusively track and believes in the effectiveness of quality one-ad-per-page. Try contacting @toddo on twitter or email me (in profile) and I'll forward it over. Anyhow, I'd love to see something like this. I've switched to DDG but often have to reach for Google if I can't find relevant results.
totemandtoken 6y ago
Not the exactly the same thing, but I had this idea for something I call "newsbetting." Basically, you get a de-titled article and have to bet as to whether it is a right-wing or left-wing biased source. The news source collects the transaction cost of the bet and the nonprofit platform is sustained through grants/donations. The goal was to provide an alternative revenue stream for news organizations which cuts out the need for ads entirely. I don't know if this idea could extend to other types of media but maybe there are ways, like sponsored vs non-sponsored content for tech news, replication prediction markets for scientific news, etc.
52-6F-62 6y ago
Wouldn't an ad-free-only search result eventually prioritize for news/info sites that have other forms of sustenance outside of readership? Digital subscription rates have been rising, but not fast enough to subsist most publications without additional ad revenue. My concern is that such a search engine would allow private interests to create "news/media/info" sites directly that qualify while long-respected publications are ostracized. Great idea if the primary intent is to index other types of content outside of that sphere, but based on the history of the modern web I think we could expect that to be gamed pretty quickly in a detrimental way. Even just writing this comment I keep coming into thoughts and it's making me realize what an interesting subject of discussion it could be. There's a lot of questions in there!
eevilspock 6y ago
i would love to see a whole TLD that was ad-free. Or perhaps go one step further create a whole alternate name service so we can ditch corrupt ICANN while we're at it. Either way you'd want clear borders for this ad-free internet and be able to legally deport violators.
- jjvens 6y ago
  There is already a custom OpenNIC TLD that serves this purpose: https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/dot/libre https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/dot/libre Unfortunately, it's only available through OpenNIC's DNS.
hawski 6y ago
That's an idea I had for a few years now. I started some motions [0], but progress was slow, because of life. I wanted to start with going through the Common Crawl [1] data at first for testing purposes and to calculate a rough percentage of sites being uBlock-Origin clean. I think that such sites would be in ballpark of a few ‰. That would enable me to offer the contentless index for download. With delta updates and torrent for distribution it could be not that expensive, but that's a thing that I could charge for. My intention is to use AdBlock rules like easylist to check whether or not indeed the page. My initial code is fine in Go, but I lost enthusiasm for Go lately and careerwise it's not a good fit for me (I don't have much time to learn something not as useful for me professionally). So I started to rewrite it in Rust, while learning it, you can laugh now (Rust Evangelism Strike Force el oh el). It has an advantage with ready to use rules parser from Brave [2] and presumably high quality tokenizer from html5ever [3]. I want to use a tokenizer instead of a full parser to be able to do stream processing bringing costs down. Common Crawl data lays on S3 so the processing must be done initially on EC2 to keep it low cost. [0] Current Go code: https://github.com/hadrianw/abracabra https://github.com/hadrianw/abracabra [1] https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/ [2] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust [3] https://docs.rs/html5ever/0.25.1/html5ever/tokenizer/index.html https://docs.rs/html5ever/0.25.1/html5ever/tokenizer/index.h... EDIT: Also for the search part I want to use something more stand alone than Elasticsearch to offer desktop search with downloaded index. When I started with Go I wanted to use Bleve [4], now I'm not sure, but I think that Bleve is getting mature enough. I will worry when I will have some data to search through. One of the challenges with this whole enterprise is a small need of JavaScript parsing. There is a common pattern, that for example Google Analytics uses, that uses a snippet of JavaScript to insert a proper script tag. But those snippets are very short so I think they may not need a full JS VM, maybe even a tokenizer would be good enough. Browser AdBlockers base on the site executing JavaScript already. [4] https://blevesearch.com/ https://blevesearch.com/
34679 6y ago
I like your idea, it's along the same lines as something I've been thinking about. I call it "The Web at Large and the Filters of Reduction", shamelessly taken from Aldous Huxley's "Mind at Large and the Filters of Reduction". Huxley "The Doors of Perception" (1954): >each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and perceiving everything that is happening everwhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. We've all heard the comparisons between the brain and the internet. And we've all been overloaded at one point by the vast amounts of useless crap on the internet. So what about a site that allows users to customize their filters of reduction? You could have popular profiles premade and ready for tweaking, or you could go raw and witness an endless stream of information raked from all over.

_t0du 6y ago

I am not an expert, but 75k seems disproportionate from the effort and time the requirements seem to be looking for. For the lofty goal of "Fix the internet", 75k seems more like "An extra few weeks of runway." What am I missing?

lightninglu10 6y ago
Hey Alex, the $75k is just a start! We're funding projects who are just starting out / getting off the ground. Imagine you have a big vision to build something that betters the internet and you have only your life savings. Or you've been working on something for a while but haven't been able to put full effort into it. This $75k is to kickstart teams & projects in "fixing the internet".
- alexbanks 6y ago
  Are there groups that have A.) A team assembled, B.) A product that's far enough along to have C.) Users, who 75 grand makes a meaningful impact? Is the expectation that those teams maintain other jobs while working with the incubator? ^ Probably a more succinct way to ask my question. I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to negatively paint the program, it's clearly more than most companies are doing to fix the internet. 75k is just the lowest amount of money I've seen with respect to incubators/funding (but again, I am not an expert).
  - lightninglu10 6y ago
    This is our first time running this Summer Incubator ($75k iteration), BUT we are in the middle of our Spring MVP Program. These teams each got around $8-10k. We have some really good projects from this much smaller program, including https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neutral/oagdejngkgbfnaankoehhanicaodcdpd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neutral/oagdejngkg... (Firefox extension releasing this week), https://ameelio.org/ https://ameelio.org/, and more! So we're not entirely sure whether $75k is the right amount or not, BUT we do know that with $10k, we've had some really impressive projects.

throwaway914892 6y ago

Where does the revenue come from if the focus isn't on making money? 75k may be a start, but it will only last a couple months at max. The better the ideas to fix the internet, the less they will generate revenue. So that's kind of a catch-22. It often takes years to build an idea, and tens of millions $.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

how about supporting the guys from gemini and bring gemini support to FF? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23161922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23161922

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
the more I think about this the more I like its potential to actually "fix the internet": not just adding protocol support to gemini:// but have FF check first if the content can be fetched via gemini:// and if yes then default to using it instead. reader-view is great but you can't switch to it until all the crap has been already loaded. supporting gemini would increase privacy, and let the users decide if they prefer content with ads and bloat and malware or rather just read without distraction.

jameslk 6y ago

Sounds interesting. Any more detail on what Mozilla sees broken about the internet and what a company would be doing to fix it? Your link gives some example types of companies but doesn't really define the mission. "Positive impact" is completely subjective. I have ideas about what this is all about but would like to see it defined by Mozilla better.

lightninglu10 6y ago
Here's some more details on this: https://builders.mozilla.community/who-we-fund.html https://builders.mozilla.community/who-we-fund.html This is certainly not limiting and we know that there are more categories and just this, but it's a start.
- jameslk 6y ago
  Thanks! That's a lot more specific and helpful

jka 6y ago

Hi Patrick! At the risk of this comment appearing as if it might derail conversation -- this really is not my intent (the iniatiative sounds great; I'm unable to find the details I'm looking for on the site) -- are these Mozilla programs open to participants/startups based outside the U.S.? Thanks!

lightninglu10 6y ago
yes! we already have teams from Asia, Africa, and Europe participating in Spring.
- jka 6y ago
  Great to hear, thank you!

EGreg 6y ago

Hi Patrick. Thanks so much for linking this. This may be a stupid question but ... what are you looking for in the "affiliation" field in the Application? Just a bit of background. This was practically made for us. We've built a "Social Operating System for the Web", an open source platform that lets any organizations have their own Facebook-level online community as easily as they can have a blog with Wordpress. We have poured years into this, attracted 8 million users in over 95+ countries, and are definitely in it for the long haul. (https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform)

lightninglu10 6y ago
Hm, I thought we got that fixed up. Put the school you went to or the last company you worked at, if it still exists when you apply!
- lightninglu10 6y ago
  Or just put Qbix
  - EGreg 6y ago
    Thanks, Patrick. That worked! This is exciting, I honestly feel our company was made for this, or perhaps vice versa. Either way, Mozilla's accelerator is the best fit for what we are doing :)

d1plo1d 6y ago

Hi Patrick, I've been prototyping end-to-end encrypted 3D printing over webRTC. Would decentralizing remote 3D printing fall under the banner of fixing the internet?

lightninglu10 6y ago
hard to tell over this short description. best thing to do is join our slack (https://join.slack.com/t/mozillabuilders/shared_invite/zt-el38cusg-~nHR7R8bJ0Gvat7C117P6w https://join.slack.com/t/mozillabuilders/shared_invite/zt-el...), and join for open office hours and see if you can get feedback from one of the mentors. regardless, you can def apply! no downsides.
- d1plo1d 6y ago
  I'm always interested in feedback. Sounds worth it even for that tbh. Cheers!

badrabbit 6y ago

I have a good idea for literally replacing layers of the OSI model with new interoperable protocols that solve problems of authentication,latency,bandwidth waste and decentralization. But alas,not a single line of code written.

ngold 6y ago

Sounds fun. My brilliant idea. Go make a browser with the UBlock Origin guy. Since it's kind of a standard for safe browsing these day's.

gkanai 6y ago

Has there been a public review of the last incarnation of Mozilla's funding of non-Mozilla projects, Mozilla Labs and Mozilla WebFWD? I feel like an honest and open discussion around what went well and did not go well with the last time this was done from Mozilla should be a prerequisite to doing this again or the same mistakes could be made. https://www.mozillalabs.com/ https://www.mozillalabs.com/ https://www.mozillalabs.com/webfwd/ https://www.mozillalabs.com/webfwd/

cabalamat 6y ago

My fix-the-internet idea is MeowCat, a distributed microblogging / macroblogging / wiki / social networking platform that uses ActivityPub for distribution. It's at https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2 https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2 Is this the sort of thing Mozilla would be interested in?