General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

but I wind up looking retro or old-school to people outside because I suck at dealing with QR codes and look like a deer in the headlights whenever someone wants me to scan one, complain every time I have to use a touchscreen, and only have Facebook and LinkedIn, with no real interest in Instagram or Twitter. Which is oddly sort of like the situation Pale Moon is in, now that I think about it...

Actually, Pale Moon is in a worse position in this sense.

Not being on the biggest social media platforms is not as niche and more common, because the public at large has already become chronically aware of the ills of such media. It's everywhere; iPad kids, dead internet theory, AI slop, degeneracy, etc. social media is a massive time-waster, everybody knows this. People use social media either just because their friends or on it, or to waste time deliberately (e.g. avoiding conversation or killing boredom) or subconsciously (social media addiction is necessarily the result of having nothing else to look forward to). So if I choose to wipe my entire online presence, and have but a phone number as a point of remote contact, people will understand. If they don't, I can easily make them, because they are familiar with the stigma around social media.

Meanwhile, only an incredibly, profoundly small group of people are into alternative web browsers apart from just whatever's available (Chrome/Edge/Safari), and within it there's an even smaller group of people that are truly, consciously aware of Google's web monopoly, and of that group is an even smaller slice that actually wants to do something about it. And then, even most of those folks have never even heard of Pale Moon.

Pale Moon as a browser truly matters in many ways. It is the final home of the XUL extensions system that was deprecated by Mozilla. It is the largest truly independent browser. It is as customizable as a browser can get. Yet, in the microscopic ecosystem of true browser competition, even in the world of FOSS, it is not even the dust under their feet.