Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a 'Terms of Use' policy — a first for the
From the new terms:
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Looks like FF is on track for enshittification, I (unfortunately and with great sadness) called it last year (and was downvoted for it lol)
Honestly, I'm starting to think it's for the best.. Firefox downfall will make people invest in an alternative web engine, I'm thinking that would be Servo, all it's left is for forks to switch to it, of course that would mean they'll be responsible for all the features and patches (which is huge work), that'll require a fundraiser, and after that figure ways to make money such as an integrated VPN, Cloud Features such as notes, public bookmarks... Etc
All we need is determination, Mozilla won't save us, I mean ... save the web
I (unfortunately and with great sadness) called it last year (and was downvoted for it lol)
Everything will have enshitification. Even Lemmy will eventually have enshitification. It's all just a matter of getting to a point of popularity to make money off of it.
The way it works is, if some corporation can make money off of a concept, they'll pump money in, to get things popular. Then once it's popular, they'll strip away what made it popular, offer it at a price, and sit back knowing you can't leave because this is the popular thing.
Reddit is doing this right now, and for the past year. Microsoft has been doing it since at least Windows 95.
The only reason linux hasn't been enshitified is that nobody with money can see a way to invest in it, control it's future, invest money to make it popular, and then rug sweep it away for profit. This is why linux will never be popular.
People flock to the thing they're told to flock to. And they're only told to flock to the thing that will make the herders money. If there's no money, there's no herd, thus no popularity.
Right now, Lemmy has something like 660k accounts, with 65k active users. Worldwide.
I'd say that less than 1% of the world even knows the fediverse exists. There's probably less than 1000 Lemmy instances.
But lets say elon musk isn't happy that twitter is bleeding users. So, he buys bluesky, and just makes it twitter2. Or, I guess if twitter is X than bluesky would be Y. And that's easy enough. Bluesky is basically as centralized as twitter is.
So now people start turning to mastodon. So now musk creates 3 billion mastodon instances. All with bots that schill GOP messaging, and require you to pay for mastodon useage. He doesn't own mastodon, but he owns his instances, which now comprise 99.9% of mastodons activity. Which now require payment to use.
So now mastodon has the reputation of being a GOP/nazi platform filled with bots. Because remember, his goal isn't to make mastodon good and retain its users. His goal is to make the alternative even worse than twitter to stop the bleed.
Now just reapply the same process for peertube, and lemmy, and all the other fediverse platforms.