[bonoboTP]

I fear their Mozilla-ification and Wikipedia-ification. Scope creep, various outreach feel-good programs, ballooning costs, lost focus etc. And other types of enshittification.

Any change to the basic premise will be a negative step.

They should just be boring quiet unopininionated neutral background infrastructure.

[Hendrikto]

> Mozilla-ification

All the Mozilla executives have done for the last 15+ years is

* lay off developers

* spend lots of money on stupid side projects nobody asked for or wants

* increase their own salaries

and all that with the backdrop of falling quality, market share, and relevance.

I would happily donate to Firefox, but this fucked up organization will never see a single cent from me. They will spend it on anything but Firefox, which is the only thing anybody wants them to spend it on.

It might already be too late, and we will be left with a browser monopoly.

[swed420]

> It might already be too late, and we will be left with a browser monopoly.

Ladybird continues to have the appearance of making progress, fwiw:

https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-02-28/

[bonoboTP]

And it is a risk for Arxiv too that once they start to drink the koolaid and start going to the same cocktail parties that these kinds of nonprofit board members and execs go to and will feel the need to prance around with some fancy stuff.

"oh no, you see we are not a preprint server host anymore, our mission is a values driven blablabla to make a meaningful change in the blablabla, we have spent X dollars to promote the blablabla, take me seriously please I'm also fancy like you! "

[musicale]

Well, maybe they don't need to be a nonprofit. How about a public benefit corporation?

And maybe that public benefit thing, well we don't really need it do we? Now that we're deep into AI you know.

For-profit has a nice ring to it. We're delivering value to founders and shareholders, where it belongs.

[musicale]

> They will spend it on anything but Firefox, which is the only thing anybody wants them to spend it on.

;_;

[cge]

>They will spend it on anything but Firefox, which is the only thing anybody wants them to spend it on.

Mozilla certainly won’t spend it on Firefox, because the structure of the organization legally prohibits them from spending any of their donation money on Firefox. The ‘side projects’ are, at least officially, the real purpose of Mozilla.

[bonoboTP]

They built the brand on Firefox then did a bait and switch. How many people who donate to Mozilla know that it's not helping Firefox?

But yeah, this is just how it works. Things can't stay good for too long. One must always be on the lookout for the new small thing that's not yet corrupted. Stay with it for a while until it rots, then jump to the next replacement.

[kergonath]

> They should just be quiet unopininionated neutral background infrastructure.

Exactly. It should be a utility. Not quite dumb pipe, but not too far either.

[doctorwho42]

We don't do 'utility' in America. Everything has S.V. brain rot - it's mixed with wall street brain rot, and now if you aren't extracting wealth out of what you have access to - you are failing.

[musicale]

I mean... someone needs to "unlock value" from ArXiv, right?

[musicale]

My prediction exactly.

Maybe a bloated foundation (pursuing expensive objectives completely unrelated to ArXiv's core mission of hosting PDFs), new classes of unnecessary management staff, new and useless paid features that nobody wants, and obnoxious nag banners claiming "ArXiv is not for sale!" but demanding money anyway.