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I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

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Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#141

Post by skinnymuch »

andybak wrote: post #103
skinnymuch wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord servers aren’t fully private. Messages can be extracted. Neither Google nor Discord need to officially do anything. The people of Discord servers can decide how info can be publicly shared. There are nuances to care about like people’s privacy and comfort.

It's worth repeating the maxim "Defaults Matter". It's a fair bit of effort to mirror Discord to the web, and it's unclear whether it's officially frowned upon. Add to that the nuances you refer to and the end result is lots of valuable knowledge that will never be preserved, will rarely be found and will one day disappear.

Those all seem like good things to me. Not the loss of knowledge being mainstreamed but the trade offs. An ultimate goal for knowledge doesn’t usually go well from my limited experience.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#142

Post by DANmode »

Intermernet wrote: post #119
awesomekling wrote: post #5

Hello friends! I am very excited about this indeed :) If you’d like to know more about Ladybird, I did a presentation about it at the Web Engines Hackfest in Spain just two weeks ago: https://youtu.be/De8N1zrQwRs

Congrats Andreas! I'm hoping that we see Ladybird become a contender in the browser space and in 10 years the browser landscape is once again diverse! Of course this means that in 20 years we will probably have another stagnated monoculture based on some weird 3rd party, hostile corporate fork of Ladybird, but by that time you will hopefully own a venture capital firm and will be happily sipping mojitos in the Bahama…

> you will hopefully own a venture capital firm and will be happily sipping mojitos in the Bahamas, and the cycle shall begin again ;-)

Or he could just be comfortable, and the product could keep delivering the same thing, with incentives mostly aligned on all sides.

Not to bring negativity to the thread, but it's certainly possibly to do better than what you've described as a tongue-in-cheek norm.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#143

Post by DANmode »

rmuratov wrote: post #92
Riverheart wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey akling, since you’re building a browser I’ve got to ask, do you have any thoughts on https://htmx.org/ or whether it could be supported as part of some extension to Ladybird?

I thought htmx is just a library, does it need support by the browser?

Make it natively supported, watch it catch on like wildfire if the browser gets any traction with devs.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#144

Post by Riverheart »

rmuratov wrote: post #92
Riverheart wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey akling, since you’re building a browser I’ve got to ask, do you have any thoughts on https://htmx.org/ or whether it could be supported as part of some extension to Ladybird?

I thought htmx is just a library, does it need support by the browser?

The htmx library emulates what would be possible if browsers supported gets/posts on other html elements like buttons. It’s a library because no browser supports this natively.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#145

Post by bruce511 »

rprospero wrote: post #113
bruce511 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to MS Phone. Tell that to Desktop Linux. Or OS/2. Or BeOS. Etc. A browser is a consumer product. As such the public will gravitate between two choices. 3rd place is no-where land. Sure 3rd place can exist, but its always a distant 3rd. Trident got canned for a reason. MS phone was a good OS, but sales offered iOS and Android. We need a stronger second option, not another option. Mozilla at least starts at p…

As a counter-point, I remember people making the same argument when Google announced Chrome. Browsers would always be a battle between two contenders and it would be better for Google to focus on helping Firefox in its fight against Internet Explorer than creating a third browser that could never hope to scrape a meaningful market share from the existing behemoths. It’s a long road for Ladybird to be a real competito…

Chrome had two benefits over IE that Ladybird doesn't have today. The first was budget, and the second was that IE development had basically stopped.

By contrast Chrome today is perhaps Google's most active development team, and has more or less an unlimited budget.

MS saw IE as a nice-to-have, Google sees Chrome as existential.

Also, while IE was very closed source, Chromium (and Mozilla) are open. That means Ladybird is competing with Brave et al for mind share, and can't play the "we're better cause Open Source " card.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#146

Post by chubot »

eropple wrote: post #140
chubot wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zulip has a better and faster interface than Discord IMO, and it's published under the Apache 2 license, making it free software: https://github.com/zulip/zulip I've been using it at https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ for over 5 years now, it's great

As I mentioned in a sibling, I quite like Zulip. But its problem is pretty simply that people have limited attention span, willingness to change, and most people in the tech space already have Slack on the brain and Discord is probably at least passingly familiar. Asking people to put up with a third thing--a third set of ways to do things, a third app on the taskbar or on the phone--is asking a lot of people in the…

FWIW I worked in software for 14 years, and never used Slack or Discord, so I wouldn't be so quick to generalize

"Everybody else is doing it" is a weak argument

"Everyone else" isn't building a browser from scratch -- it's more important what those people are doing and using

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#147

Post by mid-kid »

pocketarc wrote: post #74
toastercat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes me think, has anyone created a Discord bot that automatically archives chats? Preferably as HTML files similar to Pidgin? That would be great.

I've thought about this in the past, it's not difficult to do. I've used the Discord API in the past, you can listen to literally all messages that happen in the server. Streaming those into a DB and displaying them in a web-based UI (with Pidgin-like HTML export) would be straightforward. Maybe that'll be my next weekend's project. Edit: My sibling mentions the appropriateness of such a thing, and I do think letting…

> surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?

For some reason, this is really hard for people to get. The discord company is super paranoid about scraper bots joining through public links, and people themselves are continuously in awe when someone digs up an old message about whatever, asking the mods to ban them for doxing.

I completely agree with the sentiment, however, and I think it should become more socially acceptable for some chats to be viewable online, like forums used to be back in the day. Even then, people would close certain subforums off from appearing for people without an account (e.g. in public searches). As it stands, however, people are not comfortable with this because nobody is doing it.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#148

Post by yrro »

mid-kid wrote: post #147
pocketarc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about this in the past, it's not difficult to do. I've used the Discord API in the past, you can listen to literally all messages that happen in the server. Streaming those into a DB and displaying them in a web-based UI (with Pidgin-like HTML export) would be straightforward. Maybe that'll be my next weekend's project. Edit: My sibling mentions the appropriateness of such a thing, and I do think letting…

> surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right? For some reason, this is really hard for people to get. The discord company is super paranoid about scraper bots joining through public links, and people themselves are continuously in awe when someone digs up an old message about whatever, asking the mods to ban them for doxing. I completely agree with the sentiment, however, and I t…

It would be wise to disclose that messages are archived publicly. But you also don't need to archive the identity of everyone in the chats, you can replace their usernames with generic identifiers in the public archive.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#149

Post by mid-kid »

andybak wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I resisted starting a Discord for my open source projects for years. With hindsight that was a mistake. I finally created one a year ago and it had a huge impact on the velocity of the project - I now have active engagement with users and a growing pool of contributors and collaborators, all thanks to that group. I think often it's important to prioritize reducing friction to getting involved over (very rational) res…

How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable? How do you feel about the fact that the long-term survival of this knowledge is at the whim of a company that is mostly focused on the gaming community and has no vested interest in preservation over longer time periods? When was the last time you found an answer to a question…

Running a discord server for an open source project, I very much echo this feeling. I came after the discord server's creation, and the best I can do is help keep the IRC open and advocate that we keep the server on the lowest security level so people without accounts can join (in the odd case that feature actually works - it's very strictly behind captchas and IP rangebans, and desktop-only). Getting people off the platform and moving elsewhere is not an option, even if I had full decision-making power.

But it's a question that constantly weighs on my mind. There's a lot of knowledge and information archived in the server, and it's really not easily findable without knowing to look in the discord server. Opening a second Q&A site would mean nobody would ask there, as the barrier to entry and use would be too high (even if it had a discord login). Using github discussions binds us even closer to github (they can't be exported), and I'm not comfortable with that either.

I would love to see a service appear that allows us to publish discord forums on the net. I feel this is the closest thing we can do to something that would actually spark change. Discord's forum system is absolutely rancid compared to everything else, but my biggest priority is getting the information out there and at least slightly ordered. I feel this would encourage the most people to actually use it.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#150

Post by mid-kid »

yrro wrote: post #148
mid-kid wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right? For some reason, this is really hard for people to get. The discord company is super paranoid about scraper bots joining through public links, and people themselves are continuously in awe when someone digs up an old message about whatever, asking the mods to ban them for doxing. I completely agree with the sentiment, however, and I t…

It would be wise to disclose that messages are archived publicly. But you also don't need to archive the identity of everyone in the chats, you can replace their usernames with generic identifiers in the public archive.

Well, yeah. I wouldn't do it behind people's backs, but I'm pretty sure people would protest, and new people would miss the message no matter how big you make it in the introduction channel.
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