Post #3994538

2026-07-21 19:18 UTC

But that plan only works if enough soft forks come together and commit to it - it will take serious combined effort (and a lot of community support and funding) to redirect the future of the web. I still have enough hope and optimism in me to believe that might be possible.

Replies (2)

@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social 2026-07-21 19:45

Folks, if your personal outlook is "this is too hard / it will never happen" - that's great, I have that voice in my head too and I also believe it occasionally. But sometimes you have to tell that voice to shut the fuck up, and actually try to do something that seems hard or difficult or even impossible. Especially when the other choice is to do nothing and watch the world rot. You are, of course, free to do that but I am not, and I'd prefer you did it somewhere not in my replies.

Open ##3994537
@zer0unplanned@friendica.rogueproject.org 2026-07-22 20:08

@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social Your plan fails because the "branding-neutral base" you described does not exist as a separate entity; it is simply the Tor Browser source code itself. Mullvad Browser already executes your first two steps perfectly by taking that Tor code, stripping the Tor network logic, and rebasing it on Firefox ESR. The proposal collapses at step 3 because the Tor Project maintains their code for a specific anonymity threat model and will not cede governance to a loose working group of other forks. Furthermore, step 4 is technically fatal: "rejecting future rebases" from Mozilla means losing all security patches and web standard updates, which no coalition of small forks has the resources to replace manually. We already have the base you want, but the community lacks the manpower to maintain a fully independent engine without Mozilla.

Open ##4018271