Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@aeva I mean, such organizations do exist, but they don't generally get funded much better, and it's also not something you really want to be centralizing into one organization for a variety of reasons

@silvermoon82@strangeobject.space @typeswitch (Notably, you *can* build offline webapps, just companies typically don't bother)

@aeva I think that might be optimistic in some ways :)

I've had a lot of conversations about this over the years with people, and I'd say that "never thought about it" or "didn't even realize libraries were being used" is overall far more common than "thought about it and concluded the application developer would do it". Not that it doesn't happen, just not very often from what I can tell.

@aeva To the added question: I sometimes pay for or donate to software. It's a case-by-case decision, and I try to pick out the projects that are having the most trouble getting funded, rather than the 'obvious' ones. Trying to spread the funding a bit more evenly.

@aeva I find that there's generally very little acknowledgment of the concept of a 'software commons'; not just in the sense of making things usable broadly, but also in terms of feeling an obligation to *support* that commons, particularly the invisible parts.

Most folks seem to think about "supporting software by donating" as a sort of "purchase-lite" where you compensate someone for their work on a thing that you, personally, use. That works to a point, but logically means that libraries and underlying infrastructure go underfunded (or often entirely unfunded), because end users never interact with them and potentially aren't aware of there even *being* a public commons to support.

I think we'll need an actual culture change to fix this problem. To change the narrative and framing from "donate to express your gratitude" to "donate to support the commons", so that the funding 'pitch' for things without direct end users becomes easier.

@Wolven Tangentially: I don't think a community browser project necessarily needs to achieve feature/spec parity to be considered successful, even at a large scale. "You must ship a complete product to achieve success" is a capitalist mode of thinking that we do not actually have to conform to in community projects.

I think it's entirely reasonable, for example, for the 'attractor' of the project to be "this is an inclusive, accessible and open development process that keeps improving every day, and so even though it doesn't do everything yet, you'll find it much more pleasant to use than the alternatives".

@Wolven Oh yeah, I am very well aware of the complexity.

I've commented about Ladybird before in another thread, but the summary of my opinion is that I'm happy it exists, but I don't think we should be betting the future of browsers on Yet Another C++ Codebase given how browsers are pretty much *the* attack surface on a modern system.

From a technical perspective, Servo is more promising to me, but I don't know how its governance will shake out. Organizations like the Linux Foundation tend to serve enterprise first and foremost, so I doubt that "a community browser" is actually what we'll get from that.

Neither really scream "yes! sustainable and responsible community project!" to me unfortunately, even though I'd rather that they exist than that they don't. But I would like for a new community project to do *better* than what we already have, not just maybe-possibly-hopefully approximate the status quo.

@afewbugs As if to prove your "no strong culture to identify with" point, this concept gets independently rediscovered constantly and then given different names, but it all seems to be the same concept - the concept of "lightworkers" is another one that seems to be very similar to what you're describing here, although more from 'new age'-y circles.