[anc84]

A opinionated, non-technological, political, negative and very social justice-ish compilation of:

- Is it safe? The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.

- How open is it? The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate. But openness is not guaranteed – it’s always under attack.

- Who is welcome? It’s not just about how many people have access to the internet, but whether that access is safe and meaningful for all of us.

- Who can succeed? Getting online isn’t enough on its own. Everyone needs skills to read, write and participate in the digital world.

- Who controls it? A few large players dominate much of the online world, but the internet is healthier when it is controlled by many.

[Mirioron]

>Is it safe? The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.

If the system protects you then you can't be yourself, because invariably these systems that protect people also censor people. Nowadays we hear about it quite often how the people that advocated for hate speech rules online are getting screwed by those same rules.

>The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate.

Except those we (you) disagree with.

>Who is welcome? It’s not just about how many people have access to the internet, but whether that access is safe and meaningful for all of us.

If you find that it's not welcome, then why not add a place that is welcome for people like yourself?

The most amazing and important thing and the internet is that it lets regular people share things with the world with little interference. Their opinions, thoughts, experiences etc.

[forgottenpass]

I struggle to figure out what they mean by this list. I would normally dismiss it as meaningless pablum, but experience tells me people do take it seriously, and when I try to I'm left frustrated. I can't find a more charitable assessment than very poor communication skills.

For example:

>The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.

I disagree entirely. Not with the the ideal of course - it's about as positive sounding as possible - but with the word "could." We don't even have this offline, it requires a level of cultural conformity that doesn't exist outside a cult's commune. It's not going to be any easier on the internet, which nullifies the distance between mutually-incompatable cultures.

At this part in the line of thinking, someone tells me to stop being unreasonable, that they represent all the reasonable people's interpretation of "loving and communicating freely," and I'm being too strict in my definition, and I should really scale it back a click. It doesn't mean a cult, it just means a large social group that gets along really well. OK been there, done that. In different groups I've been both an insider, a fringe member, and an outsider. I don't think "live, love, learn and communicating freely" describes a single one of them. It might be easier to get along than randos, but you're either at the core steering the group to keep everything from falling apart with lots of bite marks in your tongue, riding the wave by keeping up with the broadly-acceptable norms you don't mind adopting in the context, or rolling your eyes at how "welcoming" the culture is while obviously incompatible with your own personality.

Then at this next point in the line of thinking, people usually just imply I'm socially defective and incompatible with all the good shit that's going on. But all I see is a bunch of fretting over the good shit not happening correctly.

[anon1000]

This "safe" language is the normal Orwellian thin-end-of-the-wedge nonsense; Rude/Unpleasant/Hateful Speech, contrary to all the hand-wavy claims, simply isn't the same as violence.

Who is welcome? Anybody with a computer and an ISP. Note that everybody from white supremacists to the most Left of Left-leaning SJW have a voice.

[zzzcpan]

Also hypocritical. Mozilla should take responsibility for its part in centralization of the online world, being one of those players with control and pushing even more of centralization into its browser.

[omnimus]

Could you elaborate on what you mean? Firefox has become ~5% browser i don't understand what "pushing even more centralisation on Firefox" means. It looks to me that currently more firefox users = decentralisation more than centralisation. Do you mean the past when it was major browser?

[loup-vaillant]

The web is fundamentally client-server, a naturally centralising model. The problem is less how diverse the clients are, the problem is how few servers we use. You could have a hundred browsers with 1% market share each, it wouldn't prevent us from being Alphabet's puppets.

Technically, most of the online applications we use today don't have to be centralised. Email, social networks, blogs, even videos, could all be hosted on "grandma ready" peer to peer systems. Why they aren't has more to do with how we shaped the market forces. (Market forces didn't come out of thin air. A big centraliser was the political decision to let our bandwidth be asymmetric.)

[J_tt]

Firefox even allows you to host your own history/tab syncing, Mozilla had very little choice besides adding these centralised features in order to even attempt to compete with chrome.

[Jonnax]

It's really weird. Firefox has such a tiny marketshare now where WebKit based browsers dictate what happens.

Also whenever there's any positive news about the browser people always like to bring up pocket, that ARG misstep or how their CEO is a victim (Use brave!!!)

[qplex]

Is it? Pretty much every Android device has a WebKit (Chrome) based browser installed by default.

[dragonwriter]

Chrome is Blink, not WebKit. They are historically connected, but forked due to major differences in vision.