This originally was going to be about just one thing, namely the overarching subject of two recent and significant blog posts by Open Web Advocacy (OWA). However, I needed to add a second “thing” when some unexpected-to-me Fediverse drama occurred even before I could actually start writing this.
Topic 1: Whither the web
We’re a few months away from a court ruling in the antitrust case wherein Google has been found guilty of having a monopoly in the web search biz. If the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) were to get its way in the ruling, Google would have to divest itself of the Chrome browser and stop paying makers of other browsers for defaulting to the Google search engine. I’ve already written in two posts this year about unintended bad results from those actions, so I was pleased in the last few days to see two major OWA blog posts on the subject.
- “Break Google’s Search Monopoly without Breaking the Web” (2025-04-23) — This is a truly massive post (its downloadable PDF version is nearly 130 pages long) but it has a “Key Takeaways (TL;DR)” section at the top that aptly summarizes it. I suspect its enormous size and depth result from a wish by OWA that it will be sufficiently substantial for use as a position paper suitable for reference in the appeals process that almost certainly will follow the ruling. That said, I suggest you read as much of the full thing as your time allows. Although it’s not without flaws and I don’t agree with every tiny part of it, I think that, overall, its points — especially where the fates of Mozilla Firefox and the dominated-by-Google Chromium project are concerned — are very much worth reading and considering, especially by those who have power, either now or in the future, over how it all shakes out.
- “Is It Worth Killing Mozilla to Shave Off Less Than 1% From Google’s Market Share?” (2025-04-28) — Sticking to the specific subject of how the ruling could doom Mozilla if the DOJ gets what it wants, this post is a much more normal length than its predecessor. I’d hope that even those who hate Mozilla for some of its actions and positions (as mentioned in the post’s closing section) can see OWA’s compelling case for not throwing out the Mozilla baby with the Google-is-a-monopolist bathwater. As OWA notes, there are other options that swat Google without starving Mozilla and, with it, the Firefox browser and its Gecko browser engine.
Topic 2: Reacting to some Fediverse drama
In a normal day up until this past Friday, I may spend all of two or three minutes looking at posts on Mastodon, so Fediverse drama easily can happen without my knowing about it. Such was the case in the last few days, when I suddenly learned of a firestorm in certain Mastodon instances over the instance I’d been using for some time, Fosstodon.
The short story is that:
- A certain Fosstodon moderator got called out on certain things he’d said on Mastodon and other social platforms.
- Some users on other instances became angry at Fosstodon’s initial response to this (essentially, “regardless of that moderator’s personal views, he’s doing the job for us as requested”).
- A movement began to either limit or ban Fosstodon’s interactions with those instances. Some did so, while others threatened to take similar actions within a few days.
- The moderator in question did depart at some point during the height of the drama, but the damage had been done and limits/bans continued.
Thus, in order to be on an instance that wasn’t (to my knowledge) in the crosshairs of such actions of fedi-banishment, I migrated my account from Fosstodon to another tech-oriented instance, Hachyderm. There, I am @BryceWrayTX@hachyderm.io, to which this site’s appropriate links have pointed since yesterday.
I recommend Corey Snipes’s post, “Thoughts on Fosstodon,” as a good explanation of how it felt to us Fosstodon users who found ourselves unexpectedly involved in a war of angry words and accusations. Note that he, too, moved from Fosstodon to Hachyderm as a result of the goings-on. Also worth reading are these posts from the founders of Fosstodon:
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