Mozilla should really double down on Mozilla VPN. Judging by all the NordVPN ads on every major youtuber's video, the profit margins must be astronomical (or their business model must be suspicious). It should provide a good income stream for Mozilla. The entire space is shady and filled with dubious actors. It is just begging to be disrupted by a trustworthy organization.
I can't think of a single candidate other than Mozilla that has the technical expertise, experience, trust, reputation, resources (not to mention non-profit structure) built over 20 years defending the open web. I don't understand why Mozilla is dragging their feet on this. They should have owned the entire VPN market by now. VPNs aren't cryogenic rockets.
Is the Mozilla organization generally responsive to social media? I have had a hard time trying to figure out where the organization responds to publicly, generally.
I would love to have a Mozilla hosted email and calendar service from them, for example. I don't understand why they aren't branching out into more common web citizen needed services.
His team lead (Dmitry Zagidulin) liked what we were doing a lot. But ultimately Tim chose to go in a different direction, spun off "Inrupt" and left MIT. We continued building our open source platform to try to realize the vision he keeps writing about: https://theconversation.com/tim-berners-lees-plan-to-save-th...
I was writing very similar things, but of course I didn't invent the Web: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
Ultimately, my point is that we tried our best. I even hired Dmitry when he left Tim's project for a while, but very quickly Dmitry got demotivated to work with us because we were putting out working code for customers, instead of conforming to standards. Back then I argued to him that we don't have a ton of funding and executions matters more, after which the winners can help spearhead the standards. After all, Twitter pioneered oAuth, and Meebo+Google pioneered xAuth (if anyone remembers that). Dmitri and I did.
So we went our separate ways, and I realized that standards are an expensive detour that can work if you have extra funds to hire people. We plan to support Matrix, Mastodon and other interoperability. But for the time being, our platform is "just" free and open source.
Whether it's the UBI "movement", or the decentralized web, or other initiatives, everyone seems to go their separate way and it fizzles out (e.g. https://decentralizedweb.net and https://indieweb.org/). I wish people were willing to join forces on projects more, and get each other funded. That's how we can build real open source alternatives to the corporate internet we are all forced to depend on.