I think “IRC (an open protocol)” served more to explain the why than the what here. It frames the whole rest of the story and why GP felt alienated.

It wasn’t because Mozilla stopped using GP’s favorite chat software. It’s because GP was a believer in the mission and the principles. Switching from an open system to a corny corporate one made the whole illusion fall apart. Mozilla was a corp all along and they took their volunteers for a ride.

Another feeling when reading "(I woudn't know, uBlock is pretty effective)" coming from a volunteer for MDN

Who else would be likely to look at what a web page is trying to get the browser to do, e.g., trigger requests for ads using Javascript. There are a variety of places to look, it is not like this is seriously hidden from those with even the slightest curiousity

That a former MDN volunteer is apparently disappointed by ads on MDN yet satisfied with MDN anyway because of a community-sourced browser add-on. An add-on that can be rendered useless at any time by the browser vendor, including the one that puts ads on MDN

It is not unimaginable that one day uBlock Origin may cease to work on Firefox when Mozilla sells search data to Google as its primary source of income and is actively working on such things as "making ads more private"

I thank the volunteer for their past work on MDN, I'm not singling him out, nor am I holding it against anyone for thinking this way, but I wonder how many uBlock Origin users believe themselves to possess some "specialised knowledge",^1 for lack of a better term, but would be all but helpless against advertising without a solution provided by someone else, e.g., a browser extension

The point I'm making is that today it seems like "knowing which app to install and how to install it" is considered specialised knowledge instead of actually knowing how to avoid ads to an extent where if the app stopped working they could devise another solution

There are definitely some HN users who can do it, and you, dear reader may be amongst them, but it seems, based on the comments I have seen over the years, there are many, many more who cannot. In that sense the situation is a bit like the IRC comment

The more one understands about online ads, the more clear it should be that so-called "ad blockers" is only a temporary solution at best, and these only work with web browsers

IMHO it is important that more people who wish to avoid ads become more curious about how they work instead of only installing a browser extension and concluding the problem is solved for the long-term

1. Many calling themselves "engineers" for example

Sounds like some decision-maker couldn't figure out how to connect to the IRC channel. That's not the right type of management for Mozilla.

Is there a widely-used open modern chat network? Specifically, I'm fine with the feature set of IRC, but I want durable messages and a mobile client.

Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.)

No wonder people don't want to join it.

(Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.

Yes, I'd echo thanks to parent, the OA and all still in the trenches.

Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware).

I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.

There were a few years where it was hard to justify using Firefox, it was just so slow compared to Chrome at the time. Nowadays it's fine again.

Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.

As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.

Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.

I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore.

Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?