Thatâ™s⠀rea​lly cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?

By default they do block quite a bit. The “Standard” tracking protection option in their Settings page says it blocks Social media trackers, Cross-site cookies in all windows, tracking content in private windows, cryptominers, and fingerprinters. They have a strict option with a disclaimer that it may break some sites or content that does a bit more.

So they’re already blocking as much as they reasonably can without affecting legitimate functionality, and they have an option to block even more.

As for “Why offer them anything?”, my guess is pragmatism. They’re a lot more likely to succeed if they propose a system where the users give up nothing but companies can thrive anyways, vs. a system where the users give up nothing and the companies in charge of everything just burn to the ground and die.

I notably don’t have a strong opinion on whether or not I think they’ll succeed with this feature. I think their intentions are pure, though, and that it legitimately offers no privacy risk to users at all. I think the best chance it has is something like government mandates. Maybe there’s also a future where they somehow get Google on board for PR reasons or something. I wish them the best of luck.

I look at it as a pragmatic attempt to work within the system we have to shift the internet away from its current nightmare dystopia of user tracking and information selling, and toward a system where all parties can be reasonably happy, with companies being able to receive aggregate anonymous data that helps them operate efficiently, without compromising even a tiny bit on user privacy.

Editing to actually respond to your question about who Firefox is built for: Definitely the user. But users don’t exist in a vacuum. Mozilla can and does consider the entire ecosystem their products and users exist within, and can take steps to make that ecosystem, the internet, a better place for users. The best part is that their actions often make the internet better for everyone - not just Firefox users.

Nothing here is incompatible with the principles of free software. The feature isn’t for the “sole benefit” of advertisers - it’s beneficial to users specifically because it attempts to shift the paradigm from one where they have essentially no privacy regarding their online activities whatsoever, to one where they give up literally nothing about their privacy.

And they are not selling data - I believe that to be a straight-up lie. I’ve searched extensively to find out if anything is being sold here. I have no doubt at all that if they were, the headlines would be about Mozilla selling user data, rather than about tracking users.

From their FAQ:

The system is designed so that neither the advertisers, nor the websites with the ads, nor Mozilla can ever tell which specific users had their activity contribute to the data being reported.

The current paradigm is that the vast majority of internet users have their activity tracked across a vast majority of websites. It’s that dozens of large companies have access to information about which websites you’ve been to, when you visited them, and what you did there. That they can and do sell this information to other companies, who usually have as their primary goal using that data to somehow extract money from you to them. Users who block tracking like this are a tiny minority.

The new paradigm would be that the companies in question know none of that, and instead get told information like “approximately 7 out of 487 people who saw your advertisement on [x] went on to purchase your product on [y]”.

I would call that pretty paradigm-shifting. The only absurd thing here is that this is somehow being used, loudly and repeatedly, to make it seem like FIrefox is somehow worse for user privacy than its competition.

People feel betrayed because that’s the narrative they’re being fed - the number of times this same exact story has been posted in the past few days is staggering, as is the number of anti-Firefox stories that have been posted in general over the past few weeks/months. But almost every time one of these anti-Firefox stories comes out, just a small amount of digging shows it’s a whole lot of narrative or even outright misinformation piled on top of nothing at all.

The truth is Mozilla did nothing here that harms or has the potential to harm its users or their privacy, and in fact they’re actively trying to build a system that, if successful, would be a paradigm-shifting boost to online privacy. Mozilla is a legitimately good tech company that has made and continues to make the internet a better place, which makes the recent coordinated push to demonize them as an enshittified boogeyman all the more bizarre, especially considering who their competitors are.

Cross-posting my comment from the post you cross-posted (and possibly created your account just to post?)

After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.

There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like that users with pre-existing installs should have been asked to have it turned on (for optics alone, apparently), or that its mission of replacing tracking cookies is unlikely to succeed. But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.

I’m absolutely convinced there’s a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.

For those wanting to follow along

Finally, a use for NFTs

Edit: Wait, nevermind, they said no throwing it away

Sure. Firefox is developed by lovely people.

Is this actually true? Rowling herself aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an openly transphobic Harry Potter fan - granted I also don’t spend a huge amount of time in Harry Potter forums and stuff.

Merry Christmas!

The second line should be r²y on the left, not ry² 😉

I had a vaguely similar idea a while ago and someone pointed out that this could incentivize spamming posts to as many communities as possible, even communities that are only questionably relevant or not relevant at all, to farm upvotes.

As a kid I got a lot of mileage out of The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. It was honestly nothing special but it was a fun if very basic game. Password-based and not all that difficult for an adult.

I agree that my idea probably wouldn’t be great, for the reasons we both stated. While multicommunities are a good idea, I’m not sure they address the specific issue bothering me either, of crossposts spamming the All feed. OP’s idea might help with that a little - but honestly, I just think the ‘Hot’ algorithm needs some more fine tuning, and perhaps custom logic to avoid showing duplicates.

On a vaguely similar note, it might be cool if using the crosspost feature pooled upvotes from the various crossposts, and only let one of the crossposts show up in anyone’s All feed at a given time. It would make having multiple splintered communities for one topic less annoying, encourage cross-posting, and reduce spam when someone crossposts something to 5 communities and all 5 show up on your All page.

To really work I think it would have to pool comments together too - but then you run into issues with moderation. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to fix that issue.

If I haven’t noticed the problem, is it really a problem?

I can live in a world where I’m out of reach from maybe 20% of the potential audience, and maybe I wouldn’t mind it if I noticed that a workaround was required for that. But I do very much mind having to live in a world where I have to be checking with the admins what the hell is going on and why I am shut off from communication with the majority through no fault of my own.

…Yes, it’s still a problem 👀 I can’t believe that needs to be said - stability is nice but reliability is also very important. It’s not good to have entire instances be effectively shadowbanned because of software issues.

While it was through no fault of your own, I’d also like to point out it was through no fault of lemmy.world, since the issue was that your instance was failing to federate to lemmy.world, and not the other way around. Neither the problem nor the fix was ever on lemmy.world’s side.

Sorry, but we will have to agree to disagree on this one. Saying “we are the largest and easiest place to get started, but if you don’t believe us here are some other places you can take a look” is completely different from “our home is full now, but the cool thing about the fediverse is that you can enjoy it wherever you are”.

We’ll keep disagreeing here as well - because it’s not accurate to say lemmy.world is full, nor is it accurate to say lemmy.world is positioning itself as somehow superior to or easier to start with than other instances. Its signup page literally has no text at all other than naming the information fields. Every single page on lemmy.world also has a direct link to join-lemmy.org in the lower right, where lemmy.world isn’t even listed as a recommended instance - just a popular one, in a randomized order list. Even the “Get started” guide in the lemmy.world sidebar takes a completely neutral tone about this instance, explains federation, and links to a site that lists other instances. The success of lemmy.world has nothing to do with bias or unfair practices. I’d wager it’s 90% word-of-mouth.

Yes, of course, and this is what needs to change!

I disagree that just having large instances, in and of itself, is a problem.

the second part

Slowing growth is still a gigantic downside when growth is one of the most important needs for the platform.

For your scenario: You could argue that this is actually a good thing from your perspective. You realized there was a problem because lemmy.world is so big. If most instances were of equal size you likely wouldn’t have noticed there was a problem at all. I’m willing to bet there are other instances you have the same problem with and just haven’t noticed because of how much smaller they are - but lemmy.world’s size helps bring problems like this to light, so they can be fixed.

the third part

That would be spreading the power, rather than spreading the load, on a semantic note.

I don’t disagree with this section in principle - but I do still disagree that the solution is to close registrations. The admins have already stated they have plans to inform new users about other instances during the registration process, and soon. That’s a good faith effort and a good middle ground.

the last part

You having to create an account here isn’t because lemmy.world is too large - it’s because of software issues. You mentioned elsewhere that you made a post from your own instance about the problem (I assume in this community, otherwise why would you expect that to work?) - but if your problem was that content from your instance wasn’t showing up in lemmy.world, I’m not really sure why you expected that to work. It’s not disturbing that you had to create an account here, because you would have had to do so even in the hypothetical scenario where there are, say, 20 main instances with about 4.5% of the active userbase each.

Closing registrations will reduce the size because users are dynamic: New users join and old users leave with any system. Close registration and you’re left with only old users leaving.

I also disagree with the implicit argument that lemmy.world is “large enough”. It’s large compared to most other instances - but in terms of long-term stability I think the lemmyverse needs at least 10x the active user count it currently has and ideally much more than that. They don’t all have to join lemmy.world, but closing the registration page for the most popular onboarding point for the lemmyverse is going to slow growth no matter how you implement it.

Closing registrations to “spread the load” also comes with the assumption that server load from active users is a problem. By all accounts it is not a problem, at all, for lemmy.world. If a time comes where there are so many users that it is, maybe they’ll consider something like this.

Just spitballing an idea I haven’t fully thought out: One interesting way to avoid excessive centralization may be to display a “Join lemmy” button to logged-out users, more prominent than the “Register” button, which redirects to join-lemmy.org/instances instead of the instance registration page. Though I agree with your point about join-lemmy in its current form being somewhat underwhelming as an onboarder. In addition to what you mentioned it could do with some filters (For language, at a minimum) and sorting (For instance age, size). Even adding a button that basically says “I understand the instance I pick isn’t that important, just send me to a random reliable one please” would help a lot.

In the long term I also hope Lemmy evolves to actually make the instance you’re on matter less - for example, by changing defaults on the homepage and search page to “All” instead of “Local”, showing global subscriber count instead of instance subscriber count when searching communities, adding ways to migrate accounts and communities between instances, and perhaps even adding a way to merge one instance into another if one admin no longer wants to maintain their instance, and another admin is willing to absorb them.