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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • And what do you do after three years? Then the cash will be used up.

    Mozilla isn’t just developing the Firefox browser. Technology is inherently political - and educating people and influencing actors politically on the free and open web is very important. Firefox is much less likely to mis-align away from their browser users than chrome simply because they don’t have the misaligned incentives like the chrome Browser which is equally made by the largest internet advertising firm of the world.

    They even has created FirefoxOS for phone at some point in the past 10 years. But I don’t remember what happened with that.




  • I am exactly doubting your suggestion of tax paid donations. I don’t think this will happen, unless we actually come together and try to actually enforce this on the political level in various countries.

    After all, open source software is an essential and critical foundation since many decades - but I’m not sure, whether there is any government that has made a pledge to donate a certain amount of money per year into the development and funding of such general purpose software. (Maybe I’m wrong though.)

    Before the fediverse can get any public funding, we need to make some political efforts. the UN is the largest such institution - and it took all the fiasco with the 2 world war to get many countries pledge to donate to it every year…


  • A decentralised platform like the Fediverses won’t easily work with nation states and their taxes. Even with Wikipedia today, it’s not funded directly via any government - but rather by certain universities giving some money to it + all the private doners.

    And even if we get that working, power politics will mess this up like so often when things actually get troublesome.

    It might be interesting to explore cryptocurrencies as for donations here though. They do have international liquidity and they can’t be misused foe power politics.



  • but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen.

    One aspect might be, that the scam stories are much more popular and easier to circulate on social media than are actual usages. It’s a strong online virality bias. Scams and phishing also happen a lot in fiat and cash (albeit relatively lower), but since most of it is so secret and banks really don’t want to get bad media, then try to keep such things hidden.

    Look at Monero (privacy coin) for example. There is no news on whales, scams etc. there, because it’s private so there is no attention given to that. That makes is easier to simply use it and not get an overly negative news bias.

    At the same time, cryptos were successfully used during Ukraine for quick money Donations. This was also reported in news, but it doesn’t stick so long into the minds of the people as the controversial scams/ftx etc.

    Finally, at least with Ethereum there is still around 10 years of development in front of it with exciting new capabilities. Until a few years from now, we’ll finally have a system with scalability ans high security as well.

    However, until then ethereum will grow slowly.

    Also, unfortunately I think the focus of many people has shifted from p2p currency and adoption to money making and investment - which isn’t too bad, but adoption still sucks and makes it less useful for now.


  • Well, yes and no.

    The issue is, that rich people take on lots of debt with their assets as collatoral (e.g. Musk taking a loan from the Saudis for buying twitter). If Musks collatoral suddenly vanishes (s.g. Tesla breaks down within a month), then the massive 10 billion USD debt will still be there. And then he’ll be very very much in negative wealth.