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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

#151

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #51
lightninglu10 wrote: post #6

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…

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

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.

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

#152

Post by hawski »

cousin_it wrote: post #22
lightninglu10 wrote: post #6

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…

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…

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

[1] https://commoncrawl.org/

[2] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

[3] 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/

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

#153

Post by hawski »

Max_aaa wrote: post #30
cousin_it wrote: post #22

Earlier 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…

How would the project sustain itself? (Hardware and hosting costs)

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.

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

#154

Post by retox »

_t0du wrote: post #24
lightninglu10 wrote: post #6

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…

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?

$16k is a LOT of money for someone with an idea, don't think about it from the perspective of the expense to Mozilla but from the perspective of the people/groups receiving the compensation. Companies that have gone on to become titans have started with much less.

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

#155

Post by jjvens »

eevilspock wrote: post #138
cousin_it wrote: post #22

Earlier 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…

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.

There is already a custom OpenNIC TLD that serves this purpose: https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/dot/libre

Unfortunately, it's only available through OpenNIC's DNS.

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

#156

Post by nl »

notriddle wrote: post #57
gambler wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 o…

Well put.

A much more sensible response would be "That button lets them pay $2/year for a basic hosting account which makes the service self sustaining".

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

#157

Post by cabalamat »

lightninglu10 wrote: post #6

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…

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

Is this the sort of thing Mozilla would be interested in?

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

#158

Post by dhimes »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #85
chris_f wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#159

Post by 34679 »

cousin_it wrote: post #22
lightninglu10 wrote: post #6

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…

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…

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.

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

#160

Post by majewsky »

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?
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