dan

Fair enough. I must say I didn’t even consider the per-search payment option - I just assumed it would be abusively expensive to encourage committing to a monthly fee, but clearly not! Thank you for demonstrating that so comprehensively.

That’s better but it still means I’d be using multiple search engines just so I don’t rack up costs indiscriminately. And honestly if I’m paying to use it that seems unnecessarily inconvenient.

$5/month for 100 searches per day (or something high enough I’d be unlikely to hit it when using it as my sole search engine) and I’d be totally willing to switch. As it is it’s just too expensive.

Kagi is so expensive. $5/month for 10 searches per day, $10 for 34/day. A staggering $25/month for unlimited searches.

I gave it a try after it came up a couple of weeks ago. It’s quite good, but it’s not that good. Its better than DuckDuckGo, it’s a bit less overloaded with seo spam than google, but it hasn’t found anything that I haven’t been able to find with my usual method - a combination of mostly DDG with smatterings of Google and a lot of adding “reddit” to searches.

I would pretty happily pay $5 a month for a single search engine that did everything, but I just use search too much so I’d have to keep my existing multiple search engine approach or pay loads.

I think it’s too expensive.

Well, think about some similar situations.

If you post something on a public website and it gets indexed by search engines, how does that work? Or how about sending email to a mailing list that subsequently sends it on to all the recipients?

In each case those organisations would likely be data controllers rather than processers, so would need a privacy policy, decide on their legitimate basis for processing, mechanisms to handle SAR/RTBF/etc. My guess is Lemmy servers would need the same thing.

Technically speaking, things are far more secure today than they were back in the dawn of the internet. Protocols are now almost exclusively encrypted where they almost exclusively weren’t. Private communication is (in theory) easier to achieve.

Practically speaking, however, now there’s always somebody there attempting to monetise your interactions. To mine useful information from what you say, or to sell you something while you say it. Or both.

That’s only going to get worse with the rise of AI, as companies realise the vast databases of past interactions might actually be worth something.

Best you can really hope for these days is to retain some anonymity and some separation between your public personas.

Paywalled :/

I wrote about this elsewhere. Every post about Reddit or place has tons of comments like yours insisting that any engagement is good for Reddit. I disagree.

Reddit want dissenting users to leave! They have no interest in retaining it’s traditional userbase of cynical, lefty, tech-savvy users. They’re incredibly intolerant of advertising and difficult to monetise, and much of the reason why Reddit hasn’t made as much money as some of its competition.

They’d rather we all went elsewhere and left them with doomscrollng cryptobro memelords that don’t care if a post is a corporate shill or not, as long as it’s entertaining.

Sure, not engaging with their site reduced their numbers and thus value. But the number of users on Lemmy is a tiny fraction that I guarantee they’d be happy to lose if it made their userbase more tolerant of corporate bullshittery.

My goal isn’t to knock a fraction off their IPO valuation, it’s to bring other users and communities over to better platforms like this one. Or, perhaps, for Reddit to realise they done fucked up and roll back some of those user-hostile changes. That takes advocacy and reminding people of the failings of the platform’s admins.

This form of protest is valid and I support it.

That’s incredibly awesome. What a fantastic way to end it!

This. Websites should use standard mechanisms by default, and optionally layer user preference stuff on top.

Every time you override some default browser behaviour you risk breaking workflows, harming interoperability and accessibility, etc.

OP would be better served with a grease/tamper/violentmonkey script to alter links (or inject a base target tag, whatever) than lobbying developers to change things. (Or, yknow, learning to use the middle mouse button).

Firefox is awesome now. It was great, then it lost out a bit to chrome, but it’s back to being awesome. If anyone’s reading this and isn’t using Firefox, please switch!

And importantly, their import mechanisms are great. A typical user can switch with basically no effort. Next time they ask you for help, switch your parents too, and your siblings, and that neighbour who keeps referring to the internet as “the google”. Set them up with Firefox and ublock origin and they’ll be set.

Sorry I’m not picking on you specifically, but every post about Reddit or r/place has someone saying something like “just leave” “any engagement helps them”, etc.

I think that’s exactly what they want.

They want the intelligent-but-cynical, hard-to-influence, infamously difficult-to-monetise dissenting mob to fuck off elsewhere, and leave them with the doomscrolling, passive users who are willing to use their app and happy to just look at whatever content is in front of them as long as sometimes there is a kitty.

The problem we have is that that mob of vocal users isn’t everybody. It probably isn’t even most users. I think they’d willingly lose us if it means the dissent goes with us.

So I don’t think this negative engagement is necessarily bad - it keeps their mismanagement in the news, and it opens users eyes to alternatives. And for me, that is the goal - to bring some of those awesome communities over to federated alternatives where no one corporate entity can take it away.

Plus it’s certainly going to be amusing if their flagship community engagement event (the output of which has been widely shared by the media in the past) has a giant “fuck spez” banner in it.

Yes, I’ve got one. I did a couple of (fairly unscientific) tests and couldn’t see a difference in temps or fan volume though.

With the big chunk of alumunium? I don't think they actually improve cooling (certainly, the fan doesn't run any less), they just put the heat in a place where you can accidentally rest your fingers on it.