At their current trajectory, absolutely. But if they focused their development efforts, cut down on careless spending especially to third parties, and looked for alternative sources of funding (it is presently not possible for users to donate to Firefox development, for example), I feel like they could survive without Google for at least a little while. Frankly, I think these things should be started on now, while they still have Google's backing.
Our startup (~20 people) got slashdotted in 1998 or so. I was the only one randomly awake at the time. Remember watching all the logs from our web server in realtime, ready to immediately kill anything or anyone threatening the overall availability.
512 kbps uplink, I think. Even accidental DoS was trivial. We had a self-hosted little data center at our office with the only available stupidly expensive commercial connection.
Felt some dread having to restart the main (async, single-process) web server a few times to keep things going due to bugs in our code. So many* people on dial-up patiently waiting for the page to load.
Its funny that these days the bottleneck is usually the data layer. Servers are so powerful now that even your average $5 server can handle HN levels of load if configured correctly.
How did we let this happen? We used to have open protocols, apps like Pidgin that would bring multiple chat clients together under one interface, IRC, Skype P2P, etc. etc.
Was it spammers that caused this mass migration to ever more closed platforms?
The vast majority of people aren't aware of open versus closed protocols. If enough people they want to communicate with are using it to counterbalance how frustrating it is, they'll use it. It happened because businesses realized there's profit in lock in, and they threw resources at it.
Open protocols are still there and still used, but we're sad because the smaller userbase is frustrating. Just like how people still publish human written content to personal blogs, but they're proportionally non-existent.
There is a huge difference between "people are complex" and actively advertising your antisocial and frankly dangerous actions online, and being proud of them.
If he wants me to disregard them, he shouldn't be writing blog posts about them.
While I understand the sentiment and generally agree with it, I find it weird that you completely gloss over the fact that it is reactive antisocial mirroring behavior.
The blogging person is definitely making stuff worse, but they're just amplifying. The source of the problem is to be found elsewhere.
A surprising amount of comments in here seem to completely disregard that for some reason.
also, people changed. Seems like nobody wants to see cute fun stuff anymore. I bet they'd get lawsuits of people claiming false advertising since the numbers aren't strictly true.
Trying to make a stab at improving RSS feed discoverability. There's a website portion and an app portion. Hope to have something to show off in a few weeks.
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