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Comment by Sven7 | Hacker News Reader

Kudos to Mozilla!

Mozilla can be more ambitious. Or atleast as bold as they once were, when they took on Microsoft.

If they can convince Baidu, Yahoo et al to keep them open, independent and competitive against the likes of Apple, Google or Microsoft, then there is no reason they can't pull the same thing off to fund an open social network or a open search engine that can shake things up a little at Google and Facebook.

I am really quite sick of the Google and Facebook ivory towers deciding where and how things should work. Most of these decisions are based on empire defense rather than the common good.

They speak the language of the common good, but constantly do things that benefit them disproportionately.

So what is their purpose at the end of the day, other than "... we are the rich; we own america. God knows how. but we intend to keep it".

They need saving from themselves. And I am glad Mozilla exists like a Ralph Nader does to keep things honest.

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>an open social network or a open search engine

Please don't! This has been both tried before and it ended in a waste of resources, money (Diaspora, anyone?) and goodwill.

You can't beat the network effect of a social network with "we are open source", people don't care that much. You either have a usecase no one else has thought about, a technical killer feature or you don't try.

With a search engine, the network effect is not as big, but you better deliver something consistently better than Google right from the start.

Both are not fields ripe for disruption as the web browser game was in the mid-2000's.

Do you have any sense of proportion? FB is worth hundreds of BILLIONs and somebody wasted $500K or whatever on diaspora...thats not a waste of resources its a single FTE for at one of these companies today....Or do you have something else in mind?

I doubt the average FTE at FB costs 500 grant, but whatever. The point is, Diaspora didn't get that money from google or one of the giants who could care less. And it is now gone without making a lot of a splash.

But in the end, that's kind of my point - FB is humongous and I hope Mozilla does not pick a fight there. As much as I despise FB, I'd rather Mozilla enters the competitions they can win.

This is a common misguided sense of what "winning" is.

Mozilla's contribution to the web, is not that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough users that they get a seat at the table to influence open standards.

And there is no reason they shouldn't replicate the model and expand that sphere of influence into other domains. Diaspora failing is not a good enough reason to bend over to Zuckerberg.

>that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough users

Well yes, but they arrived at this by having a vision what a good browser is at a time when browsers were abysmal. They didn't arrive there by just wanting an open-source browser. Yes, there was a network effect at play too (everyone "optimized" for MSIE), but they were able to bootstrap their user base with the tech-savvy who were fed up with the horrible HTML/CSS/JS support browsers of the time offered.

They did not have that vision with FirefoxOS - they wanted to secure a foothold in the mobile market, but had no compelling idea on how to gain that in the face of Apple/Google. Similarly, disliking Zuck is a a really bad reason to pour energy into yet another open social network.

For what it's worth, Diaspora kind of sucks at the moment but it's not gone. Federation works, so it will probably be a good while before the network of Pods gone entirely.

Search does not have to be better it just has to be good and more private. See e.g. duckduckgo

I try to use DuckDuckGo by default, but I have to switch to Google very often to get decent results.

This is constantly improving and if you have any relevancy issue examples you can always reach out (adam@duckduckgo.com).

Also if we're your default you can always use !g to forward a search to encrypted.google.com if the results don't meet your needs. In fact you can forward your search to over 6000 sites (https://duckduckgo.com/bang) and even suggest your own bangs :)

Well really, open source doesn't mean anything in the context of a Website. So what if you have the source code Google uses to run their query engine, crawlers and index if you dint have all of their data. The same applies to facebook.

The Open Data movement is more applicable here. With that in mind there is Common Crawl and Open Street Maps.

The thing about collecting data out of good will or for some nonprofit mission is that you have different standards, motivations and methods for connecting data than for public for-profit corporations. Some data should not be collected, at least without permission. Privacy and copyrights are issues Google and Facebook deal with after the fact not before they collect the data.

Mozilla is a legacy browser business that's mostly surviving off of Marissa Mayer's quixotic obsession with building a search business for Yahoo!. Their mobile ambitions have thus far been a rounding error in terms of overall market share, and Firefox on iOS is a massive capitulation to Apple in that it uses Apple's HTML and JavaScript engines, not Mozilla's, so even if it succeeds (SPOILER ALERT: it won't) it mostly just helps them keep their legacy browser viable for longer because it lets iOS users share bookmarks between phone and desktop, it doesn't help them grow marketshare or fight the Webkit/Blink duoculture. And they're developing Rust, despite their constant insistence that Servo isn't a product. (Although I think that's largely a product of them remembering how Netscape killed itself through rewriting a browser from scratch, and not wanting to repeat the experience.) I don't think they have the resources to open up another front in this war, much less one as ambitious as an open social network (or one that bites the hand that feeds them as much as an open search engine -- they're not being funded by Google anymore, but they're funded by Google's rivals in search).

And you think Facebook doesn't have powerful rivals? You think the content industry or the advertising industry that keeps it running likes the fact they are beholden to one network.

This is a matter of using some imagination and presenting the case to the right people.

I am unsure as to why those powerful rivals of Facebook would want to pay Mozilla, a company with no special expertise in building a social network, to build a social network. Especially since the most well-funded company that is a direct rival of Facebook is probably Google, which is the company that Mozilla just got away from being dependent on, and has their own social network already that they probably would prefer to this hypothetical Mozilla social network.

Look at the content world, whether its Disney, the movie studios, Comcast, the news networks, ESPN, HBO etc. why aren't they putting their top quality content on Youtube?

Why are they building their own infra?

Why are Amazon and Netflix making their own content?

The most simplified reason - after whats happened with the music and news industry, the content producers don't trust Silicon Valley. And most importantly marketing of content cannot happen without Facebook today. And that's just media.

There is the telecom sector (Verizon, Vodafone, AT&T) which believes all kinds of interesting things about the traffic silicon valley generates.

There is the advertising industry which has seen more and more of the data and tools they used, being built into FB and offered directly to their customers.

There is Apple which has suddenly realized their user base might pay for security, privacy and non ad supported networks.

There are all kinds of other players in tech from Twitter to Linkdin to Quora to Snapchat to Uber who are constantly worrying about how their data might overnight start flowing into FB\Whatsapp\Instagram etc.

And this is just the US. There are all kinds of extremely resourceful entities outside who would love leverage against FB and Google.

Mozilla is the ideal non threatening entity they might get behind. Nobody is expecting FB to be dethroned anytime soon, but that doesn't mean any of them are enjoying the control they hand over to them. Tapping into that frustration, can result in a more even playing field in both search and social.

So you're saying that Twitter might give Mozilla money to develop a social network? Twitter already has a social network and no money.

I am likely to piss a bunch off here, but i find that Mozilla, and various other large FOSS projects, have gotten distracted by design and social issues.

Meaning that they are diverting resources that could have gone towards hammering out the best code there is towards eternal UI tweaking and "getting XYZ into coding".

I'm inclined to feel the same way, but I feel like there's been a pretty big shift in the last ~decade where users suddenly care about design far more than functionality, quality, etc (yes this is mostly anecdotal). I find it a more likely explanation that the people at Mozilla are more aware of this than I am and are optimizing for what they think is important to their success: a userbase.

I think most users don't care either way. But a vocal minority has gotten very hung up on UI/UX design.

Frankly i see this as a ripple from the .com era. As the web went commercial, people that formerly learned about print (and other) media production moved online. Thus we got the "geek" persona, someone who worked with servers but was still "stylish". This to distance that activity from the "nerd" persona, that was seen as "non-stylish".

Sadly, the geek get all the attention by being "social savy". Thus a small, but apparently loud, group of people end up with undo influence.

I think the Mozilla-Yahoo alliance is a very natural one. I think Yahoo going all-in on Firefox is the key to Yahoo's relevance, that is, if there anything Yahoo can do to remain relevant at this stage.

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