[lightninglu10]

Hey all, Patrick here & one of the mentors for the Mozilla Builders "fix-the-internet" incubator https://builders.mozilla.community/.

We have 3 different offerings for this Summer. All incubator style, meaning you meet weekly or biweekly with mentors and we really try to help drive you from point A to point C.

1. $75k investment in a startup. MUST be serious about wanting to build something awesome and put in the hard work it takes to do so.

2. $16k funding in a much earlier stage project (idea stage / MVP stage). MUST be serious about commitment it takes to get to launch.

3. OPEN LABS: these are open to the entire community and you have access to the mentors. 10 min checkins each week & peer sessions. We've had TONS of amazing projects for our Open Labs in the Spring and we hope to see TONS more for the Summer.

In terms of MISSION and what we're looking for:

We started this new incubator out of Mozilla in order to work with & invest in developers, startups, and technology enthusiasts who are building things that will shape the internet and have a positive impact without needing to hyper focus on the bottom line. We call this our ”fix-the-internet” incubator.

[cousin_it]

Here's my "fix the internet" idea: build a search engine that is itself ad-free, and searches over only the ad-free segment of the web. More options: allow users to exclude sites with ads, sites with ecommerce, sites with tracking, or simply allow users to build and share lists of sites to exclude. Rationale: the unmonetized or under-monetized web was awesome, a lot of it still exists under the radar now, and it would be good to reify it as a tangible thing. Bonus 1: competitors probably won't copy your features. Bonus 2: spam won't be a big problem, as most of it contains ads.

[52-6F-62]

Wouldn't an ad-free-only search result eventually prioritize for news/info sites that have other forms of sustenance outside of readership?

Digital subscription rates have been rising, but not fast enough to subsist most publications without additional ad revenue.

My concern is that such a search engine would allow private interests to create "news/media/info" sites directly that qualify while long-respected publications are ostracized.

Great idea if the primary intent is to index other types of content outside of that sphere, but based on the history of the modern web I think we could expect that to be gamed pretty quickly in a detrimental way.

Even just writing this comment I keep coming into thoughts and it's making me realize what an interesting subject of discussion it could be. There's a lot of questions in there!

[chris_f]

I launched a new search engine a few months ago and have been looking at several alternative ways to fund it, but none of them seem to be a viable path.

The best balance of privacy and user experience seems to be display ads related to search term context that don't do any tracking (like billboards in the real world). But even that isn't an easy proposition and will need a custom network built to generate those type of ads.

A lot of people say they will pay for a search engine, but it is such a small niche that I believe the cost would be prohibitively expensive, and the search engine would probably still be subpar to Google in many respect. Would you pay $10/month, what about $29? Those are most likely where the monthly fees would have to be for this type of product.

[calvinmorrison]

I would love a search engine that had a -ecommerce option. Sometimes I want to buy shocks for a f150, sometimes I want to see how to replace it. What i don't want is to wade through all the ecom sites.

[freediver]

Can you point to a site that has f150 shocks replacement information that it not commercial in nature? (no product sales/ads/newsletters/affiliate links) I am very curious and have a hard time finding one.

[dhimes]

This is exactly it. And I could fill in my own profile that I share. And when the switch is on the search engine would have access to it to filter ads and allow marketers to target me properly.

[eevilspock]

Do you realize how much we are all paying on average already to Google? There is no free lunch. Googles money comes from advertisers who get that money from us -- nearly everything we buy today has advertising and marketing costs baked in. For many things, those costs actually exceed materials and labor for the simple product.

Excerpt from an old comment of mine [1]:

Mozilla Research put the entire web's advertising revenue at $12.70/month per user. In other words, if they are right we are living with the consequences of advertising for a mere $13/month, $13 dollar they still get from us anyway because it's baked into the prices of the advertised products.

---

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043324

[chrsm]

I used to work for an ad network (BSA, Carbon Ads, etc) that does not intrusively track and believes in the effectiveness of quality one-ad-per-page. Try contacting @toddo on twitter or email me (in profile) and I'll forward it over.

Anyhow, I'd love to see something like this. I've switched to DDG but often have to reach for Google if I can't find relevant results.

[pwdisswordfish2]

https://wiby.me

[xrd]

I am learning Svelte, so I typed that in:

https://wiby.me/?q=svelte

Two links came back:

"Facts on Farts" "NiceJewishMom.com"

Not a good first impression.

[ByteJockey]

In it's defense, svelte is actually a word that appears on both of those pages.

[afandian]

One of the big questions about search engines is "what is it trying to do?"

The simplest is "search for doc that contaons" . But we're used to "search for document about concept" by now. ISTRC Bing called themselves a "decision engine".

I don't know what Google is/trying to be now, but it often thinks it knows my business better than myself, excluding critical words.

I don't think there can be a universal answer. The corpus gathering is a huge barrier to entry, but having a common corpus would still allow room for competition on diversity of querying methods.

[ByteJockey]

Their niche is to search the "classic web".

Atleast the title in firefox says:

> Wiby - Search Engine for the Classic Web

That's also probably why you didn't find any information on the svelte framework.

[cousin_it]

Very cool! Though it seems more like a hand-picked directory than a search engine with a crawler, as it doesn't find quite a few good noncommercial pages that I know exist.

[burkaman]

Looks like pages have to be submitted here to be included: https://wiby.me/submit/

[armyofbots]

I think humans are better at building such a thing if the aim is not gobbling up the entire web but only light websites that aren't commercial. I think that would be hard or impossible to automate. It definitely has an early 90's vibe in terms of results. Not terribly useful be but interesting nonetheless.

[tylerchilds]

1. cool.

2. the purple for the links makes me think i've already clicked and seen everything

[mlacks]

this is such a therapeutic way to internet surf. No distractions - just content. thank you so much

[myu701]

Added to my FF search. wonderful.

[arm64future]

There is a hidden chat server on there.

[armyofbots]

thank you for posting this, I've spent the last hour pressing surprise me

[eevilspock]

i would love to see a whole TLD that was ad-free. Or perhaps go one step further create a whole alternate name service so we can ditch corrupt ICANN while we're at it. Either way you'd want clear borders for this ad-free internet and be able to legally deport violators.

[34679]

I like your idea, it's along the same lines as something I've been thinking about. I call it "The Web at Large and the Filters of Reduction", shamelessly taken from Aldous Huxley's "Mind at Large and the Filters of Reduction".

Huxley "The Doors of Perception" (1954):

>each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and perceiving everything that is happening everwhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

We've all heard the comparisons between the brain and the internet. And we've all been overloaded at one point by the vast amounts of useless crap on the internet. So what about a site that allows users to customize their filters of reduction? You could have popular profiles premade and ready for tweaking, or you could go raw and witness an endless stream of information raked from all over.

[duxup]

Is there enough content where searching just the ad-free segment is ... worth it?

What happens if you're a top result on the add free segment and you start incurring some level of costs? Do you drop off if you add an ad?

Granted I really like the idea, I'd love to see it tried, but I wonder what all the unintended consequences would be / skeptical of the value of segregating "ad-free" vs. "has an ad of any sort" vs. the sites that really are a mess.

[eloisius]

The add-free segment of the internet does indeed sound like a niche market. I wonder if quality of results could be drastically improved by just penalizing domains that contain a lot of referral links and ads. I remember the days when it felt like you could learn anything by searching the web a bit until you found some suitable content to read. Now it's like sifting through reams of affiliate spam that I have to at least skim before I can tell that it's low quality garbage.

[Max_aaa]

How would the project sustain itself? (Hardware and hosting costs)

[ShamelessC]

I'd honestly appreciate this enough to pay a subscription for it if there was a policy that meant the subscription fee was explicitly to avoid needing revenue from shady business.

I believe fastmail is like that.

[pwdisswordfish2]

Begging and government grants, like Wikipedia?

[pkaye]

So why doesn't Mozilla go for government grants instead of getting money promoting Google Search?

[hawski]

There would be drastically less content and the whole operation could be easier, because you probably don't have to worry so much about spam websites. That would keep it low cost already, not single DigitalOcean droplet cheap, but I think it could be sustained from a programmers pocket initially.

Donations/patreon for one, then subscriptions. It should be possible to offer a contentless index for download (I estimate it could be around 50-200GB) and that could be a paid option.

[totemandtoken]

Not the exactly the same thing, but I had this idea for something I call "newsbetting." Basically, you get a de-titled article and have to bet as to whether it is a right-wing or left-wing biased source. The news source collects the transaction cost of the bet and the nonprofit platform is sustained through grants/donations. The goal was to provide an alternative revenue stream for news organizations which cuts out the need for ads entirely. I don't know if this idea could extend to other types of media but maybe there are ways, like sponsored vs non-sponsored content for tech news, replication prediction markets for scientific news, etc.

[hawski]

That's an idea I had for a few years now. I started some motions [0], but progress was slow, because of life. I wanted to start with going through the Common Crawl [1] data at first for testing purposes and to calculate a rough percentage of sites being uBlock-Origin clean.

I think that such sites would be in ballpark of a few ‰. That would enable me to offer the contentless index for download. With delta updates and torrent for distribution it could be not that expensive, but that's a thing that I could charge for.

My intention is to use AdBlock rules like easylist to check whether or not indeed the page.

My initial code is fine in Go, but I lost enthusiasm for Go lately and careerwise it's not a good fit for me (I don't have much time to learn something not as useful for me professionally). So I started to rewrite it in Rust, while learning it, you can laugh now (Rust Evangelism Strike Force el oh el). It has an advantage with ready to use rules parser from Brave [2] and presumably high quality tokenizer from html5ever [3].

I want to use a tokenizer instead of a full parser to be able to do stream processing bringing costs down.

Common Crawl data lays on S3 so the processing must be done initially on EC2 to keep it low cost.

[0] Current Go code: https://github.com/hadrianw/abracabra

[1] https://commoncrawl.org/

[2] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

[3] https://docs.rs/html5ever/0.25.1/html5ever/tokenizer/index.h...

EDIT:

Also for the search part I want to use something more stand alone than Elasticsearch to offer desktop search with downloaded index. When I started with Go I wanted to use Bleve [4], now I'm not sure, but I think that Bleve is getting mature enough. I will worry when I will have some data to search through.

One of the challenges with this whole enterprise is a small need of JavaScript parsing. There is a common pattern, that for example Google Analytics uses, that uses a snippet of JavaScript to insert a proper script tag. But those snippets are very short so I think they may not need a full JS VM, maybe even a tokenizer would be good enough. Browser AdBlockers base on the site executing JavaScript already.

[4] https://blevesearch.com/

[jka]

Hi Patrick! At the risk of this comment appearing as if it might derail conversation -- this really is not my intent (the iniatiative sounds great; I'm unable to find the details I'm looking for on the site) -- are these Mozilla programs open to participants/startups based outside the U.S.? Thanks!

[lightninglu10]

yes! we already have teams from Asia, Africa, and Europe participating in Spring.

[jka]

Great to hear, thank you!

[_t0du]

I am not an expert, but 75k seems disproportionate from the effort and time the requirements seem to be looking for. For the lofty goal of "Fix the internet", 75k seems more like "An extra few weeks of runway." What am I missing?

[lightninglu10]

Hey Alex, the $75k is just a start! We're funding projects who are just starting out / getting off the ground.

Imagine you have a big vision to build something that betters the internet and you have only your life savings. Or you've been working on something for a while but haven't been able to put full effort into it.

This $75k is to kickstart teams & projects in "fixing the internet".

[alexbanks]

Are there groups that have A.) A team assembled, B.) A product that's far enough along to have C.) Users, who 75 grand makes a meaningful impact? Is the expectation that those teams maintain other jobs while working with the incubator?

^ Probably a more succinct way to ask my question. I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to negatively paint the program, it's clearly more than most companies are doing to fix the internet. 75k is just the lowest amount of money I've seen with respect to incubators/funding (but again, I am not an expert).

[lightninglu10]

This is our first time running this Summer Incubator ($75k iteration), BUT we are in the middle of our Spring MVP Program. These teams each got around $8-10k.

We have some really good projects from this much smaller program, including https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neutral/oagdejngkg... (Firefox extension releasing this week), https://ameelio.org/, and more!

So we're not entirely sure whether $75k is the right amount or not, BUT we do know that with $10k, we've had some really impressive projects.

[somishere]

Neutral looks cool. Look forward to trying it out once it's released (tho permissions on the chrome version seem a bit ominous, plus their website is broken!)

[marissajliu]

Hey it's Marissa from the Neutral team. Thanks for checking our tool out! Just want to mention that Neutral only accesses data on supported shopping sites like Amazon to perform carbon footprint calculations.

Sorry about the broken site! We're currently fixing it up along with the release of our tool on Firefox!

[retox]

$16k is a LOT of money for someone with an idea, don't think about it from the perspective of the expense to Mozilla but from the perspective of the people/groups receiving the compensation. Companies that have gone on to become titans have started with much less.

[PudgePacket]

Weeks? A startup looking for funding of this amount shouldn't be burning anywhere near that amount (tens of thousands a week!)

This should be months, up to a year for 1-2 founder team.

[alexbanks]

...How?

3 people / 75k = 25k per person. At a reasonable 100k/year earning potential, that means that 75k a year is 3 months of time?

[PudgePacket]

You pay yourself what you need to survive and use the rest to re-invest in the company, extend the runway, do marketing, etc.

You can't walk away from your day job at $BIGCO, start your own company and expect to get paid like you used to, it doesn't work like that (at least at the beginning).

Your pay is having a large % ownership in (what you think will be) a valuable company down the line.

[alexbanks]

It seems kinda wild to suggest a fair deal is making ever so slightly above minimum wage for an already established team, company, product, userbase, no?

My issue, I guess, is not with salary, but moreso the value add. 75k does not seem like enough to A.) Live on, really, B.) Extend runway, really, C.) "Fix the internet", really. I can understand trading in cash for agency, I would absolutely do it. But this doesn't really seem like that either, given that presumably lots of founders would need to either seek further funding or work second jobs.

[PudgePacket]

I don't think you'd go for this if you're an already established company. 75k is for 1-2 people who have probably launched less than 6 months ago or are launching with that money.

It's also not just the money. It's credibility by being invested in mozilla (and an investor who is invested in you having more successful funding rounds), it's the marketing and hype that come with it, it's the opportunities to employ people, it's the connections that come from being acquainted with investors and a tech giant, etc.

[majewsky]

What salary levels are your calculations based on? For a solo founder in Germany, 75k should be enough runway for roughly 2 years, more if their business is at least ramen-profitable, less if they have more employees of course.

[alexbanks]

My salary calcs are based on A.) Primarily west-coast based American SE wages, B.) The presumption that the group already has a "team" (aka more than 1 person) assembled and a product already launched (as per the requirements of the 75k program).

Two people living on 38k a year sounds like a great way to not have legitimate talent apply.

[majewsky]

38k a year is in the range of my actual gross salary as a mid-level software developer in Germany, although it should be noted that I work 70% part-time. It would certainly be enough to cover an entry-level developer or a founder who's willing to take a smaller pay in exchange for the freedom of working on their own project. And that's before we consider startups located in Eastern Europe where cost of living is lower, but you can still find competent developers there.

[alexbanks]

And that may be true, I am just pointing out that trying to "Fix the internet" by pandering to mid level developers seems like wasted effort.

[gkanai]

Has there been a public review of the last incarnation of Mozilla's funding of non-Mozilla projects, Mozilla Labs and Mozilla WebFWD? I feel like an honest and open discussion around what went well and did not go well with the last time this was done from Mozilla should be a prerequisite to doing this again or the same mistakes could be made.

https://www.mozillalabs.com/

https://www.mozillalabs.com/webfwd/

[throwaway914892]

Where does the revenue come from if the focus isn't on making money? 75k may be a start, but it will only last a couple months at max.

The better the ideas to fix the internet, the less they will generate revenue. So that's kind of a catch-22. It often takes years to build an idea, and tens of millions $.

[_8j50]

I have a good idea for literally replacing layers of the OSI model with new interoperable protocols that solve problems of authentication,latency,bandwidth waste and decentralization. But alas,not a single line of code written.

[jameslk]

Sounds interesting. Any more detail on what Mozilla sees broken about the internet and what a company would be doing to fix it? Your link gives some example types of companies but doesn't really define the mission. "Positive impact" is completely subjective. I have ideas about what this is all about but would like to see it defined by Mozilla better.

[lightninglu10]

Here's some more details on this: https://builders.mozilla.community/who-we-fund.html

This is certainly not limiting and we know that there are more categories and just this, but it's a start.

[jameslk]

Thanks! That's a lot more specific and helpful

[DyslexicAtheist]

how about supporting the guys from gemini and bring gemini support to FF? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23161922

[DyslexicAtheist]

the more I think about this the more I like its potential to actually "fix the internet":

not just adding protocol support to gemini:// but have FF check first if the content can be fetched via gemini:// and if yes then default to using it instead.

reader-view is great but you can't switch to it until all the crap has been already loaded. supporting gemini would increase privacy, and let the users decide if they prefer content with ads and bloat and malware or rather just read without distraction.

[cabalamat]

My fix-the-internet idea is MeowCat, a distributed microblogging / macroblogging / wiki / social networking platform that uses ActivityPub for distribution.

It's at https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2

Is this the sort of thing Mozilla would be interested in?

[EGreg]

Hi Patrick. Thanks so much for linking this.

This may be a stupid question but ... what are you looking for in the "affiliation" field in the Application?

Just a bit of background. This was practically made for us. We've built a "Social Operating System for the Web", an open source platform that lets any organizations have their own Facebook-level online community as easily as they can have a blog with Wordpress. We have poured years into this, attracted 8 million users in over 95+ countries, and are definitely in it for the long haul. (https://qbix.com/platform)

[lightninglu10]

Hm, I thought we got that fixed up.

Put the school you went to or the last company you worked at, if it still exists when you apply!

[lightninglu10]

Or just put Qbix

[EGreg]

Thanks, Patrick. That worked!

This is exciting, I honestly feel our company was made for this, or perhaps vice versa. Either way, Mozilla's accelerator is the best fit for what we are doing :)

[d1plo1d]

Hi Patrick, I've been prototyping end-to-end encrypted 3D printing over webRTC. Would decentralizing remote 3D printing fall under the banner of fixing the internet?

[lightninglu10]

hard to tell over this short description.

best thing to do is join our slack (https://join.slack.com/t/mozillabuilders/shared_invite/zt-el...), and join for open office hours and see if you can get feedback from one of the mentors.

regardless, you can def apply! no downsides.

[d1plo1d]

I'm always interested in feedback. Sounds worth it even for that tbh. Cheers!

[ngold]

Sounds fun. My brilliant idea. Go make a browser with the UBlock Origin guy. Since it's kind of a standard for safe browsing these day's.