It’s a small team, they do great work and keep the internet functional for a huge chunk of us, and they’re burned out. It’s a defeat.
Putting work into blocking any ads is phenomenal, and tackling Facebook as long as they did is heroic, full stop. I’m a little bummed that there seems to be no way to donate to the uAssets team.
However no one who uses adblock should be using Facebook either, it’s a garbage platform that is literally 97% ads.
I hate Facebook with a burning passion, but I believe it’s important to keep blocking ads on it because
- Philosophically, ad blockers aren’t just for niche websites, they are supposed to be general-purpose content blockers for literally everybody, which is part of the purpose of web browsers: to be a user agent. (I saw a lot of people use this point back when Google was contemplating implementing Manifest V3, which ultimately prevented as users from using a browser the way they chose)
- I bet a lot of people who use content blockers are not nearly as invested in privacy technology as us, which is perfectly fine, especially if it provides a gateway into being more aware.
- The more normalized content blocking is (e.g. if it’s even for Facebook boomers who don’t care about privacy), the harder it is for it to be written off as some niche activity.