The grand idealism of the free and open internet might be over for now, but in its place falls a more practical mindset. Just like Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs are entering their “Hard Tech” era, the people building web alternatives are also entering their Post-Naive Era. Here are the names to know.
“Please accept our cookies bro!”
“And please follow us on Bluesky, Instagram, Linkedin, Spotify, and Tiktok! Together we’re building a better internet!! wooo!!”
Fucking hell Mozilla. What became of you.
Who are the fools supporting this shit. If you want to support a better internet, Servo and Bonfire are two good examples of worthier causes.
I’m one of the few volunteer contributors to Bonfire, and I would never dream of recommending Mozilla to use it. You have to reach out to people where they are at, not pick the tools based on prime principles. American platforms are blackmailing us by gatekeeping access to audiences, but it’s not like you can pretend most humans are reachable on microscopic federated platforms. Which btw is not the intended use case for bonfire.
And of course it loads content from Google! :( Well, it tried, because I block all that stuff, but how sad anyway. There are very few “independent” sites out there these days, all of them depend on third-parties, sometimes for a valid reason, but many others not.