> Sort of embarrassing that anyone vouched for this comment
I'm the one who vouched it. I don't check commenters' history before doing it. Maybe I should. My LLM-detector is apparently broken (especially on short posts). At face value I saw nothing wrong with it, so I vouched it.
> Smol (often paired with lorge or bean), is an Internet slang term used to describe any animal, character, or object that is considered very tiny and cute
> Using such quirky in group markers like that can limit the audience or give some potential readers a bad impression from the readers opinion on such a group.
Good, I think the kind of people who would feel the use of "smol" impacts their enjoyment of this kind of project are not really the target audience anyway.
I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore.
Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?
I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.
As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was).
I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
If moderation is the problem maybe only allow downvoting? Of course that may bring to the surface a different set of problems (no solution is without drawbacks), but it removes the "numbers go up" incentives.
Says who? I, for one, don't really like the idea of "everything is http(s)".
After all, dissatisfaction with the status quo is the reasons this space (gopher, gemini, etc.) even exists. If, like you say, nobody wanted this we wouldn't be here discussing it.