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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Care to give a summary on why you think they should be blocked ahead of any bad acting? Yes, there is some concern about Meta attempting EEE, but ultimately they’re a large platform that can bring a lot of users and attention to the Fediverse. There’s nothing preventing large instances from blocking them down the line, and with user level instance blocking coming in 0.19 to Lemmy (not sure if Mastodon et al have something similar), you can block them personally yourself if you wish, rather than having that thrust upon you by your instance admins.





  • Well, the reality is, search costs money. Quite a lot of money it seems.

    So that is either paid for by you, or by someone else. Nobody is going to run search as a charity. So it’s going to be paid for by parties interested in paying for your attention.

    Even if you run ad blockers or use meta search engines like searx, you are going to be finding results by companies that have paid to be there.

    I am a heavy search user. My search quantity is reasonably large just from personal use (I’m a curious dude, what can I say?) but my professional use of search as a software developer is staggering some days. My anecdotal experience is that that Google search has been declining in quality for years, and especially over the last two or three. DuckDuckGo is a nice alternative for privacy (potentially), but I while I find myself feeling less in a walled garden with them, I don’t actually find their results to be any better than Google’s.

    I have tried Kagi recently. So far, I really like it. I genuinely feel like I get good results (read: find something quickly that is relevant to what I searched). I love their lensed searches that let you search the indie-web, and I love that they let you add weightings to websites that you trust.

    It is expensive, no doubt. But for a certain audience that relies on quality web search, prefers to not be walled in by paying search engine optimizers and values paying for a product rather than opting to be the product, Kagi offers a solution.

    Having said that, I would love to see the cost come down and make it more accessible to the many and I appreciate that for most people, the “free” search engines are good enough.



  • I default to DuckDuckGo as well. I don’t really like it, and I certainly don’t trust it any more than I do any other for-profit organization. I just wanted something that isn’t Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

    It’s really quite fruitless though. Maybe 80% of my searches end up having a !s or !g (really just for variety…) thrown in, as Google’s results are just better.

    DDG image search spits out porn as often as it does something relevant. I can change content moderation options if I want to reduce it, but I don’t have to do that with Google.

    Kagi has caught my attention lately. I’m going to try it and see if it feels good value for the money. I’m not opposed to paying for search, but this does feel expensive (I say that having no idea of the true cost of running a search company). Obviously, privacy is out the window as it’s paid for and linked to an account. But as I feel I’m not really getting that anywhere else either, I’m more hoping that it will just provide good search results.