Hey all, Patrick here & one of the mentors for the Mozilla Builders "fix-the-internet" incubator 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 ha…
Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
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Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
#52Hey 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/
Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
#53It'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.
Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
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 int…
We have some really good projects from this much smaller program, including https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neutral/oagdejngkg... (Firefox extension releasing this week), 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.
Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
#55The 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 th…
If you are going to recommend regulation the only thing that works, as exemplified by every other profession, is credentials: licensing and certification. There would be less bad software in the world if there were less bad software developers employed writing software and everybody else held to a minimum ethical standard.
Right now, at least before COVID, there was no motivation to write good software. Many developers, at least web developers whether front or back end, only goal was employability which often meant tooling to a tech stack and trying not to write original software.
Edit: I anticipate this will be downvoted extensively, because regulating minimal developer competence is always heavily down voted. It’s curious though that people claim there is a problem they want fixed only until they realize the fix applies directly to them, at which point the problem is no longer worth the effort.
Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
#56>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…
Who will host the webpage in your scenario?
https://blog.hypercore-protocol.org/posts/announcing-hyperdr...
Cloudflare has an ipfs gateway. https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/
The Brave browser also supports ipfs out of the box.
This is the Web 3.0 movement. The distributed web is on its way.
Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who will host the webpage in your scenario?
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.
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.
Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 woul…
https://wiby.me
2. the purple for the links makes me think i've already clicked and seen everything
Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
#59Real 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”.
I'd be more interested in a fork with site isolation per process, no X11 exploits on Linux, etc. We need a new Gecko - perhaps a fork of something else with all the resources Gecko gets put into it.
Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments
#60I 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.