I wrote:

Is their BAT token needed? Certainly not, and I would be fine if the 3-8 euros worth of BAT I receive every month (depending on my mobile usage and on their success as an network) were sent to me directly via SEPA.

SEPA (in case you don’t know), is the money transfer network between banks in Europe.

I’m very much against Google when their actions are taken to enforce their monopoly and that give no other choice to people. For all the flak that Chromium gets, it is still open source and the browsers that are built on it do not necessarily need to implement all the things exactly like Chrome. Brave has not adopted manifest v3 and already stated that will not implement WEI.

it’s clear you want crypto in your browser.

Careful, you are already inching into dishonest rhetoric. I explicitly said “The token is not needed and I would be fine if they could pay in cash”. Are you also going to blame my language skills for that or can you simply agree that there is no existing better alternative for worldwide micropayments?

I know what I wrote, and I wrote a list of counterpoints that work as reasons that I have to use Brave. I thought it was clear that one of the things that are important about is that it can give a way to pay to users and that no one else (that I know of) does it.

"“All in all” was meant as way to summarize what I wrote above, not overrule it. I can’t force you to interpret it in the way that I meant it, but in case you are in doubt: Safari or anything else from/for Apple is automatically disqualified.

Look at the very first item in the list of counterpoints in “my one comment”. Do Safari or Orion provide anything like that?

I despise argumentation-by-gotcha. if you need to be so pedantic, here is another qualifier to my choices: “these alternatives must not violate my basic freedoms, so anything closed source is out.”

A project, not concerned about blocking ads but rather making sure that it’s their ads that you see?

Do you understand that it is completely opt-in and people get paid for those ads?

Both are for MacOS (I’m on Linux) and neither are open source, which is also something important to me.

Also, where do any of these provide “a system where users get a share of the revenue from the ad networks”?

But why would they?

Because it would be one very interesting marketing point? For a browser that promotes itself as “focused on protecting users” and “not selling you out”, having a built-in (even if not enabled by default) ad-blocker would make a lot more sense than adding integration with Pocket.

rational arguments and logic based debate.

There is nothing logical about claiming “Firefox is a browser and browser need to render the page as is”. First, even that were true it does not require them to enable the ad-block by default. Second, this definition is contrived and seems picked up just to give a rationalization that gives them some moral ground about their omission. We could just as easily say something like “a web browser is the user agent to access the www and as such it can always modify the web page in favor of the user”. Why is that you choose to go for a definition that just happens to favor the business of their biggest source of revenue?

Sorry, this is a terrible and senseless pontification. They could have always bundled an ad-blocker without having it enabled out-of-the-box.

Brave’s objective is to create a system that looks altruistic but they control it and take a ever increasing cut.

I don’t see how? All they control is the ad network. Viewing the ads is opt-in. The ads they displayed are stored in device, and the code that selects which ads to show you is open source. The system for verifying ad views can be audited by any party. The token is on the blockchain so they can’t manipulate and the contract does not have any special rules.

Assuming a world where Brave gets significant market share, the “worst” they could do would be to change the promised revenue share, but if they went to do that then users would lose the incentive to opt-in into the ads, and they would more likely lose revenue and open themselves for competition. (That’s a risk that could run even if they did everything right, by the way)

using a different browser is the only good way to protest.

That is not true. “Though Brave uses Chromium, Brave browsers do not (and will not) include WEI”.

A problem would be if those contributions affect the project in a negative way.

And I could make the argument this is in the case with Mozilla and Firefox. Mozilla being so dependent of Google’s revenue means that they will never take any measure that could be seen by Google as a credible threat to their business. Ask yourself why Firefox never included an ad-blocker by default or has kept its mobile browser crippled for so long, or got rid of FirefoxOS…

Some counterpoints:

• I like the idea of a system where users get a share of the revenue from the ad networks, which then can be used to support other content creators or businesses online. I think that if most of the web worked like this, we wouldn’t have people being treated as eyeballs and we would still have the power to vote with our wallets to choose who is actually worth of our attention. Is there any other browser or company doing anything like that?

• People keep talking about Firefox as if it’s a paragon of virtue, but casually forget that they are only alive because they are completely dependent on Google to survive and are nothing more than “controlled opposition” nowadays. They also have done a ton user-hostile shit like sponsored links in the frontpage and completely crippled pocket, and let’s not forget that current Mozilla execs are raking in millions while laying off people and disbanding key projects.

• The crypto part keeps called a scam, but their system has been working perfectly fine and it has always been liquid enough for me at the exchanges. Is their BAT token needed? Certainly not, and I would be fine if the 3-8 euros worth of BAT I receive every month (depending on my mobile usage and on their success as an network) were sent to me directly via SEPA. But can anyone realistically say that there is any efficient worldwide way to distribute payouts? For every dollar you sent to someone via Patreon (or Ko-Fi, or any alternative), how much do they get to keep? With the Brave creators program, all of the $15/month that I send to the different people get to them.

All in all, I will stop using Brave in a heartbeat if there is anyone else providing any alternative with a slight chance to fight Surveillance Capitalism. None of the Chromium or Mozilla forks are doing that.

how AI would enhance web browsing

I’m not a fan of calling these LLM things “AI”, but there are tons of things where this could make sense to help in decision-making. Example scenarios:

• I want to plan a vacation but I don’t have a exact plan or date. Instead of aimless browsing around or giving my data to a bunch of travel sites that will bombard me with “deals”, I can set up an “AI agent” that will check the current prices, weather conditions and etc to find spontaneous trips.
• I want to make a “DIY” project and some of the components are fixed by the design, but others can vary. An AI can give me suggestions for variations and find me the best prices for the materials required.
• If I am looking at a product on Amazon, an AI can summarize the reviews in a way that I care about.
• I can find a recipe that a like and ask an AI to make a vegan/gluten-free/kosher version of it

etc, etc, etc…

I would totally support a campaign that eatablished instances to close registrations if they had more than 5% of the total users in the fediverse, and only open again when/if went below 3%. This would ensure that no instance dominated the landscape and it would prevent abuse from the admins in large instances.

Yeah, one thing I need to do is to make sure that the people who are coming in for free are not just lurking around. They are not heavy consumers of the service, but the idea is that the first ones should come to help bootstrap the instance content.

As for what you are doing for your minecraft server, I think it is quite reasonable if you treat it as a hobby. You are not doing it expecting compensation, so at least you should be doing it in a way that you can be healthy and sustainable.

If you charge from the early adopters, you will have a disincentive to get them to join and you’ll never be able to bootstrap the network.

I am actually trying the opposite with my instance, the first 250 members will have free access, after that access will require a subscription of $8/year.

My primary argument against any attempt to keep donations as the main model of funding: everyone talks about the fediverse “being like email”, but we don’t hear of “donation-based” email providers, do we?

At the end of the day, hosting a Mastodon, Matrix or Lemmy server is work, perhaps even more work than hosting an email service. I don’t think it is fair to try to get service providers to put up these servers online and then try to find a way for them to support themselves. To me this feels like asking a photographer to “work for exposure”. Unfortunately, Big Tech and VC-funded companies flipped this around and convinced users that these services should be all like this, but the reality is that this kills independent software developers and service providers.

I still think we should focus on the professionalization of fediverse hosting. Unless your instance is just a hobby for you and a handful of people, being an admin or moderator of an instance can be a full-time job. People talk about donation-based instances as a model of sustainability, but there is no instance that is actually in the black if you account for the time of admins or moderators.

Brave gets a lot of hate because of its ties to crypto, their recent moves really do not help much, but overall I am a fan. The browser feels designed to be a true user-agent, all of the crypto-related features are opt-in and it’s the only system where the user gets a share of the advertising revenue.

It seems that a lot of content creators (especially the popular ones) feel like that Brave is hijacking “their” ad dollars, but honestly to me it seems that their model is right: the ad dollars don’t get to the creators directly, they go to users and the users can choose which creators they value most. This to me seems more fair and also gives people the power again to “vote with their wallet”.

In my ideal world, people would use be using Brave, collecting $5-$10 worth of tokens every month and redistributing them to creators they like. This is what I’ve been doing since 2019 at least. If the majority of Brave’s millions of active users did the same, the internet would be a lot saner and less algorithm-driven than it is today.

So far I am happy with Brave Search, but I completely agree with the sentiment. I think that any ad-based business stops worrying about end-users once they reach a certain size and they only way to avoid this is by ensuring that customers can vote with their wallet.