OK now that arstechnica has written about it, shills might stop nagging in the comments about my titling. LMAO

Note just to be sure, Mull is a different thing than Mullvad. What you wrote makes sense for Mullvad, but I am not so sure if this is the case with Mull, the mobile app.

I don’t think we understand very well the threat model here. Are we talking about having a Mozilla account or the web engine itself. If you have an account they will probably start doing mining shit with it. What about activists researching certain topics then? The content browsed can be visible to Mozilla if they use their account for syncing bookmarks. That should be a dealbreaker right there. No different than Meta user-profiling the fuck out of your engagement behaviors. Now if this is NOT the case and you haven’t a Mozilla account, I assume that the version of the web engine available back at the time of the fork is exactly the same. So far so good.

The problem is that browsers are hard, and there is a ton of web protocols to be implemented, various fixes for security, support extensions and other QOL features. WORD ON THE STREET is that tasks like these cannot be undertaken as solo/hobby projects, that funding and an organization structure is essential. The teams behind LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc have a track record of already lagging behind Firefox’s version updates. Same goes with user-profile and configuration sets like Arkenfox (if I am not wrong). You may tweak the conf all you want, but if privacy and anonymity is compromised at the web engine level, these forks will be left with little to do about it. Then the only option will be to keep using an old version of the web engine (sacrificing security and quality of life extensions), or ditching the gecko web engine altogether.

That is why people are looking for genuine alternatives to the web engine.

I thought Mullvad was the best in anti-fingerprinting. Anyone can check their own configuration with EFF’s “cover your tracks” site.

You write a wall if text thinking you will shift the views of disgusted people turning their back to the product, a product at that which was iconic for their open source culture, and yet it somehow managed to alienate the niche that was more favorable to it. Good luck with that!

This is trolling. It is beyond self-evident that the Open Source fediverse has thoroughly criticized the latest Mozilla move. I myself point out device fingerprinting and third party vendors. You respond to neither approach. You want me to do homework and quantify the sentiment on the trending Mozillla hashtag? Sealioning. Diigressing the topic of conversation? Report and block you sad impotent spook troll.

Your mastodon feed might be different that mine, lmao

https://mastodon.social/tags/mozilla

if just a handful of idealists

If they are so few why does their vote matter that much? Futile attempt to undermine those who disagree with oneself on the basis of statistical sums.

suck it up

This arguments goes both ways. You say I suck it up, I say you suck it up, I don’t put my friends’ life/well-being on the line, for the sake of some half-baked moderation bias one considers self-evident truth.

the third-party purist who made their heart sing.

This is not what happened. All analyses point to that Harris failed to mobilize progressive voters. But this is not a discussion we are having right now, I have made my point very clear in this post including the contributions of others underneath.

So this is a dishonest ad hominem argument, that contradicts itself. I expect it to be thought of as refuted, and one should not resurrect it as per the anti-sealioning policy.

I am a pragmatist, you are an idealist.

1. This is not what these words mean.
2. You don’t get to define what other people determine themselves as.
3. I am ideologue with certain material interests, and you are an ideologue with a different set of interest, who is willing to solve equations with human lives.
4. A centrist although presenting as non-ideologue, is willing to protect his moderation bias even with the lives of other people he thinks as ideological purism.
5. By continuously compromising with the worst amongst the humanity for precious election points he makes society worse for all of us.
6. The real meaning of centrism is that you are flexible with your red lines against fascism and corporatism, and weigh human lives according to their ideological distance from oneself.

history shows that “radical solutions” are almost always a mirage

We have LibreWolf, Mullvad, TorBrowser, which are all Firefox forks of course. If we are talking about possible extinction of the gecko engine perhaps we could have this discussion anew, but because these other projects exist, not because we have to support any ill advised move Firefox makes that time and again alienates this community.

To further this argument, there is, well, open source in general, which many people frame by the same “moderate-biased” arguments you propose. Nonetheless it exists and thrives, and it is well shown that the GPL licenses are better for developers. All this happens because of what you dismiss as “idealists”, from the era of Creative Commons, Independent Media Center, and the Internet Archive, to the Tor Project, Tails, SciHub and all other good things the internet has to offer comes from ideologues. Even Lemmy that you are currently using.

So whatever is outside the centrist’s tunnel vision is just non-existent. That makes the centrist an extremist naive empiricist, lacking non only object constancy but also the intellectual sophistication to stipulate configurations of the world outside his immediate and temporary surroundings.

The blithe centrist happily leeches off to preach ad nauseam that middle ground with spooks, fascists and advertisers is a universal truth we must blindly succumb to. Then it is shown that the centrist is not just naive or misguided but actively hostile and dishonest (see first section of this comment for evidence of your logical inconsistency and dishonesty) with people of different opinions, so they prove themselves not to be centrist at all, but diet fascists.

To sum up, in this post I have shown that:

• Centrists can be tactically motivated and intellectually dishonest.
• Centrist are in fact intolerant of views different than theirs.
• Centrists are immoral and undemocratic, in their pursuit of middle ground with perpetrators of exploitation and discrimination.
• Centrists are in fact extremist in their naive empiricism, tunnel vision, and glorification of the status quo that was given to them, which is by definition conservative.

Combining common terms from the above propositions: Centrists are tactically motivated, intellectually dishonest, intolerant to difference of opinion, indifferent to the rights of others, immoral and undemocratic apologists of exploitation and discrimination, extremist in their empiricism and conservativism.

Centrist? Better call them sentries of the status quo. Disclaimer: I hate centrists with a burning passion.

Someone should tell Mozilla about the AI-sized environmental concern in their browser?

It’s called offset /s

With no intention of stirring the pot, this sounds just like the pre-election arguments in favor of Democrats.

The last voice that cares even slightly about our privacy will be gone.

The emphasis here should be on “even slightly” rather than the dramatic effect of “the last voice”.

I mean, if this slice approaches zero, then why it is better to stay with Firefox rather than moving on to more radical solutions?

Interesting, I will check those out. For the record, I phrased my way so to not be conviction specific or even religion specific. I would like to see questions exploring different religions, so perhaps queer theology is the closest. Sad that this should sent someone back to reddit though.

You might be overgeneralizing. I have never posted anything religion related exactly because I see how religious people are treated online, and you know it just felt like shutting up for LGBTQ+ issues in school because speaking up would get you in trouble too. Sounds like bullying to me. Also, atheists shit on all religious people unprovoked in their own niches, like all the time.

So yes, exactly the fact that many religions are anti-LGBT is a point of identity conflict for many people. Some LGBTQ+ people might have been religious before realizing or coming out. So this is a point of discussion in itself. And most leftish people wouldn’t really care to have it. Ergo, a need for a “space.”

As an innocuous example of sharing data with pure bash and Arise, these people here have preserved the Trigedasleng dictionary, the fictional language from the science-fiction/young adult show The 100, after another fan site was taken down. They use a github repo as data backend, and Arise as a static-site generator for github pages. All their data are stored in lots of version controlled JSON files instead of a database. According to the authors, this democratizes the process of forking and adding data to the repository.

I think Arise is sth I had seen and at the time motivated these thoughts. It is a bash based static site generator, that, according to its docs, it is build with the philosophy of minimal language requirements as well as other dependencies.

I would argue that a solution like this is better than heavily nested JSON files, or a cascade of Ordered Dicts in Python, or even a db.sqlite that would require the user parse or query the data somehow. In fact, a user could retrieve the static site from their own distro package manager and run it in bash with minimal dependencies.

I haven’t tested this solution yet, but it looks very promising as to what I originally had in mind.

About the technical side of my response. I have difficulty understanding your concern, because from what I have seen so far, NOSTR is a protocol and has different implementations. As a protocol it is very liberal since it mostly goes on to specify the structure of the “event” data type. In the specification I saw that it specifies signing and verifying notes with private/public key pairs, but I haven’t seen yet where on the protocol level it requires Bitcoin Lightning. Is it possible that you have looked into a specific implementation which elected to use such cryptographic keys as to make it interoperate with the Bitcoin blockchain to start with? In that case, the articles linked by the project mention that the protocol is simple and can be implemented “in a weekend”. That means that instead of even forking it at all you can roll your own in your chosen framework?

I have had a look into Nostr. My remarks perhaps will start a whole other thread but I will express them. For one thing, I had a quick look at odysh some time ago, and I have left with a sour taste about the connotations of ‘censorship resistant’. Don’t get me wrong I am of course against state censorship, but I (unironically-please say otherwise) wonder if there is more to this phrase than nazi dogwhistling. Within censorship resistant social networks is there a) the possibility to mass block, mitigate harassment brigades, tag nazis, and combat other types of toxic trolling and brigading? b) is there absolutely any level of moderation possible, including and going beyond the possibility to go back and delete stuff posted by trolls, or even illegal stuff like slander, hate speech, revenge porn and worse? I can’t start a discussion about censorship resistant networks if these conditions are not met, because so much dogwhistling has, well, “smuggled” these meanings into the term, and I am reluctant towards it.

If that is the case, then it arguably be an extra step for new people to join. I fear that not many will unless already familiar with Bitcoin etc.

orm of authentication, I’d be very interested. I’m obviously not going to roll my own auth from scratch….but as I see it, tying BTC to it could prevent MANY people from giving an otherwise very promising tech a chance.

I am not quite familiar with the overlap between Bitcoin and authentication. In fact it seems I assume they are totally separate things. If you care to explain further or point me to the right resources?

Sure, I understand Matrix fine. On the contrary, I don’t get why people find it harder to switch to than Discord?