Apparently the dump doesn’t include media, though there’s ongoing discussion within wikimedia about changing that. It also seems likely to me that AI scrapers don’t care about externalizing costs onto others if it might mean a competitive advantage (e.g. most recent data, not having to spend time and resources developing dedicated ingestion systems for specific sites).

I want to stress this: it’s not that “tech bros” are just stupid—even though a lot of them are revoltingly unappreciative of the giants whose sholders they stand on—it’s that they don’t care.

No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.

I don’t think that’s unanimous. I’d like to use Firefox Relay, myself, and I’m willing to give thundermail a chance.

Used to think I’d go full Proton eventually, but leaning more towards a diverse set of service providers, nowadays. It’s also my hope that these services allow Mozilla to depend less on companies like Google, and more on the users they ought to serve, which would be healthier for the org and better for users.

Yes, sort of. Thundermail addresses, apparently, or bring your own. From the linked article you’re commenting on:

Users can send and receive email using new Thundermail accounts they sign up for. The service will also allow using your own custom domain (e.g. your.name@yourdomain.com).

I should donate again. As someone who still depends on gmail, I keep forgetting how annoying it was to get ads every time I refreshed my inbox, before I switched to their app. Glad things seem to be working out.

If they’re user funded, their incentives are fundamentally different from Google’s. Even thinking as a business, it makes no sense to enshittify the way Google does. It’s a different choice, even if it’s not the choice you wanted.

They said it will be opt-in and are trying to make it local-first. Their provider(?) apparently allows fallback to nvidia cloud compute when the hardware can’t handle it.

I’m not using AI to write my fucking emails, regardless. Just wanted to let people know.

p.s. Sorry, I’m dumb, skipped over quote in parent comment. Point is, there’s more to the service than optional AI bullshit, and you shouldn’t have to disable it.

Might be nicer if they just didn’t care.

Check the comment section for the video version of this article by Niccolò, or the comment section of the post on r/browsers, or the replies whenever these issues are mentioned on Twitter, and so on, and you’ll find a bunch of brave people saying stuff like:

you unintentionally just made me like brave over firefox. now i can switch to a chromium based browser and not even feel bad about it

Yes i am installing Brave after this advertisment!

Thanks to this video I deleted Brave then redownloaded it

These were taken directly from the video. They’re on the mild side. Throw in also some “stop inserting politics (other than mine) into tech” comments, and a few homophobes not even trying to hide it. Rather than not caring, many of them like it a lot, especially the right-wing politics.

I don’t think every Brave user is a cunt, but fucking hell, are loud cunts seemingly attracted to Brave.

To folks bothered by this: know that the lead developer of Ladybird is a big fan of Brendan Eich.

Whenever I post such things, I get a small wave of displeased people. Rarely get thanks, though. Even if it takes a bit of effort, and I inevitably find yet more stuff. That’s ok, praise obviously isn’t the point.

But it demoralized me a little, how there’s always downplaying. It’s never enough. I can say Brendan Eich is homophobic, ideally you shouldn’t support him, and someone will tell me he invented javascript, and that makes it ok (my entire point is thus null, I am overreacting).

Your thanks encourage me to uselessly annoy and present no arguments a bit longer. Thank you.

A single line of documentation? How about looking into some context? Hurt feelings my ass, Andreas isn’t some innocent, silly little guy who never does anything questionable.

And which cause exactly are you talking about? Because I don’t know about you, but I’ll stand for real, marginalized people over lines of code on a screen any day.

I’ll give my take on it. Something many fail to grasp is that it’s not about a singular thing, you need to look at the context. Let’s go through some of it:

• Andreas Kling, lead developer of (now-)Ladybird, rejects PR that changes “he” to “they” in documentation.
  • This is the most frequently mentioned example of Andreas’ issues.
  • The “he” in question referred to any user, where “they” is already commonly used instead by everything from companies, to news, to the Linux Kernel docs (an arguably much more important software project).
  • Andreas’ exact words: “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
  • This code was eventually merged 3 years laters in a different PR, this time described as “Grammar fixes” (it changes even more pronouns to gender neutral than the original did).
    • This PR was merged two hours after its creation and coincidentally around a month after Andreas announced his stepping down from the project.
    • An unrelated post by the contributor, same day.
  • Someone got his attention and tried to explain to him why that’s not cool; he doubled down, assuming the worst from the original contributor.
• Andreas Kling likes interacting with far-right, queerphobic, or otherwise controversial persons.
  • Here’s him calling Brendan Eich, known homophobe, kicked out of Mozilla for… being a homophobe, now CEO of the foremost crypto browser, infamous for its bravery and attracting like-minded fans, “Senpai.”
    • A far more impressive man than Andreas will ever be.
    • Brendan’s great …Also shouldn’t have decried him in the past for being a homophobe (he did to fit in).
    • Memeing about Brendan Eich’s secret to success.
  • Here’s him welcoming Vaxry, infamous for the toxic community of his hyprland project to the point of being kicked out of the freedesktop.org project. He’s also on record saying “I do believe there could be arguments to sway my opinion towards genocide”. There is a print of this, somewhere. I will find it and put it here.
  • Here’s him doing a talk with Bryan Lunduke, tech’s premier transphobe anti-DEI, anti-Woke conspiracy theorist with a classic far-right victim-complex.
    • Trudging through Bryan’s slop wears on the mind, but here’s another example of him being ridiculous. Highlight of the article: “There are multiple Software and Computer organizations which have declared their support for the Trans fetish over the last few years…”
      • Read anything by Bryan, then look into what he’s talking about. There are at least as many examples, as there are times Bryan has touched upon LGBT topics or linux in recent years.
    • Here’s relatively prominent KDE developer Niccolò’s hour long video detailing how Bryan is a horrible, lying “journalist,” and how people need to stop giving him a stage.
  • He also often interacts with other various degrees of right-leaning users on twitter, a platform he describes as full of positive energy, unlike Mastodon, which he’s not a fan of.
    • Worth noting: Firefox, Vivaldi, Zen and even Brave (to their credit) are all active on Bluesky, the most popular twitter alternative that isn’t Threads. Vivaldi hosts their own mastodon instance. Mozilla used to as well, but it didn’t take off. Nonetheless, their twitter activity dropped heavily on their 2.4M followers account. Zen (a young firefox fork driven mostly by a student’s free time and donations) is also active on mastodon.
    • Even Servo, the browser engine, is active on Bluesky and Mastodon.
    • Ladybird, predictably, has an X account and a discord server.
    • For fun, I would like to share with you, dear reader, my favorite comic about the state of twitter (all within 10 min of scrolling—Elon’s pushing it hard).
• Other quirky things about Andreas that could be irrelevant in isolation but… please, put the pieces together. I’m begging you, look at the full picture. Is there truly nothing off about all of this?
  • Thinks the left doesn’t contribute to Open Source, and the right does all the work.
    • Hey, remember that time Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, called himself a “woke communist” on a public rant on the fediverse? He must be having an identity crisis now, huh.
  • Self-described centrist and apolitical.
    • I can elaborate on why this isn’t good, but I think most people get it.
  • Wary of people publicizing likes.
    • Someone once implied that if people didn’t like Andreas’ views now, they would’ve abhorred his Liked list before Elon made those private. It’s a random person’s word, so don’t take it as fact, but I need to share this because I’ve seen similar situations before, and it fits the pattern.

Would I look at that PR and say I’m not touching Andreas with a ten-foot pole? Maybe that’s excessive. Would I ignore all the rest and say he’s just misunderstood? Hell no. For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. But I cannot support it until Andreas gets his shit sorted.

P.P.S. I’m tired, of all this.