Nick on Nostr: I think the argument is even stronger for Mozilla's foray into privacy preserving ...

I think the argument is even stronger for Mozilla's foray into privacy preserving advertising. The reality is that the current Internet runs on advertising dollars. I think that's bad, and I would like that to change, but if it's possible to change that it will be difficult and take a fair amount of time. In the interim, you can just block or evade advertising if you have a tiny sliver of the browser market, but if you have any significant share then doing so will essentially put you in a battle with every site your users want to visit. Either sites will work poorly on your browser (because they're trying fight your features), or you'll kill the sites your users are using (by starving them of revenue).

That means you have to find some less-privacy-invasive, near-term solution to the advertising funding problem as a bridge to the future. Brave already tried this with their BAT system, but it hasn't really seemed (to me) to go anywhere. Mozilla is making another run at it. I don't know if their solution will be a good one, but it needs to be tried. We cannot grow a significant alternative browser ecosystem by starving site of revenue; that only works for niche browsers.

And doing this work might also put Mozilla in a good position to offer an alternative to advertising-based revenue, just as Brave was trying to do with BAT.