Nick on Nostr: I remember the early, largely ad-free web. It was cool, but much, much smaller, and ...
I remember the early, largely ad-free web. It was cool, but much, much smaller, and only of limited practical use. And it was an experiment, while people tried to learn how it could be used and how to make money off of it. It was never a sustainable state. Likewise, the current situation on Mastodon is not a sustainable state. It takes money to keep a site online, and people who work on them or produce the content they host have to eat. A vibrant web cannot exist without some way for people to get paid.
The vast majority of the browser market runs on WebKit and Blink, so if Google and Apple come to some mutually agreeable arrangement, they can force pretty much whatever they want on the rest of us. That's precisely why we need a resurgent #Firefox or other 3rd rendering engine.
I understand you seem to think that no one is willing to put up with ads in any form, but I think you may be over-generalizing your own attitudes. People widely use Google services (including Chrome and Android) and commercial social media sites, which are well known to make all their money off advertising and surveillance. Free apps (which necessarily make money primarily off advertising and surveillance) dominate mobile app stores. I might like to live in a world where most normal people won't put up with advertising (because that's my own attitude), but we simply don't live in that world.
Subscriptions can work for some very popular/large site or niche sites with a very committed audience, but they don't work for sites in general because there are too many. That would only potentially work with a functional micropayments infrastructure that does not exist. It's also debatable whether it's working for news sites, at least in the US, other than the few largest outlets.
It seems like your solution is to let the open web diminish to a shadow of its former self, starved of resources. I agree that's an option, but I'm not sure it's a desirable one. But, in any case, I think it's clear that won't be the position of people making a web browser, so then it is rational for them to seek some form of privacy-preserving advertising as an alternative, and it doesn't make sense for people to vilify them for that (as I've seen here and elsewhere); they're just trying to explore one of the few open avenues for a vibrant open web to continue. It might not work in the end, but it's a reasonable thing to try.
The vast majority of the browser market runs on WebKit and Blink, so if Google and Apple come to some mutually agreeable arrangement, they can force pretty much whatever they want on the rest of us. That's precisely why we need a resurgent #Firefox or other 3rd rendering engine.
I understand you seem to think that no one is willing to put up with ads in any form, but I think you may be over-generalizing your own attitudes. People widely use Google services (including Chrome and Android) and commercial social media sites, which are well known to make all their money off advertising and surveillance. Free apps (which necessarily make money primarily off advertising and surveillance) dominate mobile app stores. I might like to live in a world where most normal people won't put up with advertising (because that's my own attitude), but we simply don't live in that world.
Subscriptions can work for some very popular/large site or niche sites with a very committed audience, but they don't work for sites in general because there are too many. That would only potentially work with a functional micropayments infrastructure that does not exist. It's also debatable whether it's working for news sites, at least in the US, other than the few largest outlets.
It seems like your solution is to let the open web diminish to a shadow of its former self, starved of resources. I agree that's an option, but I'm not sure it's a desirable one. But, in any case, I think it's clear that won't be the position of people making a web browser, so then it is rational for them to seek some form of privacy-preserving advertising as an alternative, and it doesn't make sense for people to vilify them for that (as I've seen here and elsewhere); they're just trying to explore one of the few open avenues for a vibrant open web to continue. It might not work in the end, but it's a reasonable thing to try.