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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

Why should Mozilla care about anything than trying to make their browser better? Slack is not their responsibility. The browser is already ton of work.

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Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit whose job is to make the internet better. Part of that is the subsidiary Mozilla Corporation, which makes money and develops Firefox, but the overall nonprofit can do other things. Think EFF, not Google.

While it is a bit weird to be pushing for a proprietary product (Slack) to add a certain feature, I suspect that this was done to 1) make the web better and 2) as a PR act to show off the work they are doing in advocacy.

> Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit whose job is to make the internet better.

Through technology? Or through (non-technical) activism?

It seems like a better spend of their time would be to build better collaboration and social media solutions, rather than lobby for a feature like this on a platform that’s mostly used in organizations but not the wide internet.

> Through technology? Or through (non-technical) activism?

Both? Mozilla Foundation isn't just an engineering org, and the internet isn't just a technology but also a place with rules and norms. Influencing the direction of the internet is a necessary part to making it better. If the EFF was the one doing this I imagine there wouldn't be any complaints, and the Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit just like the EFF is.

So what are they going to do next, campaign for MS to make "Teams" actually usable? That might actually make the Internet better, but it's also way out of scope of what Mozilla's mission ought to be. This seems more like a desperate attempt to stay relevant (and continue to receive donations).

"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."

…until they express the wrong opinions.

Whats wrong about 'this extremely powerful business communication tool should have privacy features for it's users'

I think they are referencing the foundation position in general, not this particular one.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

It’s about the trend of using censorship/silencing as a solution for everything, of hiding from opposing viewpoints rather than countering bad ideas with reasoned debate (and simply not feeding the trolls)

While a block button can have positive uses, you shouldn’t need one to deal with legitimate harassment in a corporate environment (you’ve got HR and disciplinary policies).

And a collaboration tool will cease to serve its purpose if team members start arbitrarily blocking each other over petty disagreements.

In non-corporate cases, well, there’s other collaboration tools you could use.

And why is this a significant issue for Mozilla?

I'm sorry, but having e2e encrypted dms in slack PROMOTES anti-censorship. Right now I literally have a second slack set up for just my team at work so we can have conversations without having to worry about our superiors looking over our shoulders via being able to read our DMs and 'private' channels.

A trend I see in companies these days is once someone leaves, instead of deactivating the account they just change the password(/or the email).

I've heard some really crazy stuff about managers laying off whole teams then changing a password and login in, reading the teams private channels after everyone was laid off.

they can get access to private channels from their slack admin. Nothing is actually private from the admin, at least admins from paid enterprise style accounts.

And Slack is like... the opposite of that?

Am I the only one remembering how they wormed themselves into workplaces by EEE-ing IRC to alleviate early concerns about the platform?

Probably because the browser is a lot of work. Easier to show "some work" doing something else, anything else really...

Same reason NY can't build new subways but CAN rename every bridge, highway, and road in the city.

One's a lot easier, and still makes the news.

Because they have no idea how to bring back the salad days of Firefox, so they do nonsense like this.

The Brendan Eich debacle was their Waterloo.

You mean when all the GamerGate trolls rallied behind Brendan Eich and made him their martyr, pretending he was fired instead of choosing to quit?

Please engage in Good Faith and try to not flamebait

You should follow your own advice, and not try to flamebait in bad faith by framing Brendan Eich as some kind of martyr or victim. Nobody ever tried to cancel HIS marriage, but he's the one who wanted to cancel and criminalize many other people's marriages. Attacking other people's human rights makes him the victimizer, not the victim. The GamerGate trolls with an axe to grind against LGBTQ+ people still regularly push that false narrative in bad faith here and elsewhere about Brendan Eich being fired and being a victim, which is bullshit. It happens often and predictably enough, and your implication is obvious enough, that it's worth debunking preemptively.

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