Sarah Jamie Lewis@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social

RE: mastodon.social/@sarahjamielew

Many have asked: "Ok, this sounds great, how on earth do we get there?"

From the few conversations I have now had: no single project believes they will ever have enough capacity to do browser dev v.s. patch work.

And no one will commit to exploration without some assurance that the base will receive long-term active development.

Absent some leap of faith, it's likely up to a new project to commit to building that base, and getting it to a stage where those projects feel like it can happen.

Sarah Jamie Lewis@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social

If the independent, non-slop web has any future at all, then now must be the time for every firefox fork to commit to working together to maintain a hardfork isolated from Mozilla.

It's a project that is too large to be handled by any small project alone (and maybe even all of them combined), but one that is too important to left under the guidance of an organization like Mozilla.

Without such bold co-operation I fear we have already lost.

Sarah Jamie Lewis@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social

Replying to @⁨sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social⁩

I don't think that is the most efficient way of bootstrapping this thing - given the amount of effort these projects are already expending purging the same garbage functionality from Firefox release after release I think there is a world where a joint effort results in more-capacity (especially if committing to developing that base independently after a point)

But I have no way of proving that, and thus a new project might be the only practical way of bootstrapping this thing.

Sarah Jamie Lewis@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social

Replying to @⁨sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social⁩

Based on the response to my thread yesterday, and the fact that I have been having conversations along this line for a year I really believe that there is demand for such a thing (and IME with doing non-profit dev work for the better part of the last decade: demand is not uncorrelated with the ability to long term fund a thing).

People want free and independent browsers, unencumbered with non-consensual bullshit, built by humans.

Sarah Jamie Lewis@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social

Replying to @⁨sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social⁩

Bootstrapping a project like this is a daunting task.

But we are where we are.

I am almost certainly not the right person to manage this, but I believe this needs to be done enough to try and get the ball rolling.

I've setup codeberg.org/basebrowserprojec as a place to start to gather notes/issues/ideas and connect people - if you have some skills or any other ability to help, and want to help, then get in touch.

Summary card of an issue titled "Introduction Thread" in repository basebrowserproject/organizationCodeberg.orgIntroduction ThreadHello. I am Sarah, a privacy and security researcher, focused on metadata resistant communication, e-voting security, and privacy for and within marginalized communities (queer privacy). You may know me from my work with the Open Privacy Research Society where I served as Executive Director, and...
Sarah Jamie Lewis@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social

Replying to @⁨sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social⁩

I've started unloading some notes from conversations I've had, and some stuff that was previously in my head.

If you are looking for a place to start, how about recommending the "features" that would need to be removed from any good base: codeberg.org/basebrowserprojec

Summary card of an issue titled "Proposed list of "features" to remove from base browser" in repository basebrowserproject/organizationCodeberg.orgProposed list of "features" to remove from base browserBelow is a list of suggestions for features that should be removed from the base browser (if downstream projects wish to re-add them as plugins that would be their choice) Some prior art: - Librewolfs' Patch Set: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source - Tor Projects' Base Browser: https://gitlab...
Sarah Jamie Lewis@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social

Replying to @⁨sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social⁩

This evening I spent some time going through the latest firefox HEAD, with the idea being to catalog how many files/lines of code could be removed solely on the basis that they only exist to power the built in llm / chat / local ai stuff.

I am currently at 136000 lines of code, a number so absurd that I have forced myself to triple check it - and I'm pretty sure I'm barely half way through this patch.

The security auditor in me weeps.

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