I mean, the business model works? They make money, they pay staff, and they are growing.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, people have price sensitivity of course. You are projecting yours onto “everyone”, is it not a successful business?

There’s a niche they cater to, if you are not that niche then you are not that niche. Doesn’t mean the niche doesn’t exist.

$10/m is unlimited searches though…

And yeah, searches are actually quite expensive. There’s a LOT of infrastructure that goes into making something unique with your own search engine that isn’t just a wrapper over Google.

The actual compute cost per search, in 2024, was $0.0125. Kagi states they want to keep Costa below $0.015 per search, but their search partners are a major expense.

That ofc ignores all the supporting infra, devs, support…etc that goes into making it all possible.

This is the kind of conversation, healthy, back and forth, and conceding instead of doubling down as we learn more that I wish was more common on the internet these days.

Bravo, really.

They’re definitely stretching themselves too thin, but as long as I get better and more relevant, cleaner, no advertising search results for my knowledge work and research. With my privacy in tact.

Then I’m continuing to pay them for a product I find to be superior than the alternatives.

According to ad hoc statistics. Between 25-50% of posters are bots. However posters are only about 10% of the Reddit population.

If we make a completely incorrect assumption and say that every single user is a poster, that still means 10-15x the entire population of Lemmy, it doesn’t really change much here.

If you take the difference between posters and lockers into account and you are crazy harsh with the bot numbers you’re really only reducing the population of non-bits by like 20% or so.

I bet they’re home addresses haven’t.

How’s the FCC going to prepare for anything when it’s being gutted?

Probably not, reddit, like all modern social media platforms, is essentially “too big to fail”. They have captured and cornered their markets and will continue to dominate indefinitely.

Throughout all of these things reddit’s user growth has went up, not down. Daily Active Users grow, month over month, more than 20x the entire population of Lemmy., just think about that, there’s more growth to the daily active user count on a monthly basis (not the totally user count), then the entire population of Lemmy, x20.

It’s depressing to think about. But it’s also reality. And reality fucking sucks.

All I can hope is that lemmy and similar continue to grow.

What advertising?

Every single time with red comes up there’s always this FUD. You, specifically, don’t miss any opportunity to make mention of this. Across Lemmy, which is rather suspicious. Helping the Russian war effort? That’s a pretty big leap here.

Why?

Imagine a search engine aggregator aggregating search engine results from multiple sources for aggregation. The more indexes they support the better the results are going to be for everyone, I don’t see this as a problem for data aggregation.

Why should data aggregation give any sort of shits about geopolitics?

Regardless, the topic of this post, fediverse search, is part of their own search engine anyways afaik

Naw, stupid easy for automated systems to clean up.

Your life, activities, and habits will be mined by machines in order to target to and to adjust and mold your habits to best fit your masters whoever wants your loyalty in ways sometimes imperceptible to you.

Consumed by companies and governments alike to target people both for monitization, and for enforcement action against the laws or political views at the time. Purchased by employers or potential employers to monitor and analyze your personal life and habits, to determine whether you are or are going to be a good worker bee. Shared with health providers and insurance companies so they can determine how and when they need to deny you service or care.

Mentioned something bad about the company CEO on the drive? Shouldn’t have done that. Talked about a pre-existing condition with your spouse? Shouldn’t have done that. Talked about your kids mental health problems in the car? Welp, now anyone with $ knows too for the rest of their life.

You don’t want your detailed data in the hands of tyrants, it will be used against you or others near you.

(Yes, everything I mentioned here already happens to some degree, yes employers can and do purchase your data from data brokers to judge your personal life. Yes health insurance will do everything within their power to deny anything they can)

Oh dear Lord. The hood has a filter???

Yeah, that’s probably fucked up, none of the filters in anything in this house had been changed in years when we got the place. The filter for the furnace was black.

And it’s been over a year since then I’m sure if the hood fan has a filter it’s absolutely disgusting.

But I also meant that the hood could have a shape to it so that it collects air from the front burners which it doesn’t.

That’s only works so long as Firefox stays alive and in development.

LibreWolf relies on Firefox being funded, if Firefox dies then LibreWolf also dies. Tens of millions of dollars go into engineering salaries to keep Firefox up-to-date on web standards, features, and performance. LibreWolf benefits from this.

It probably has to do with the type of burner I’m going to guess.

We’ve had both induction and electric stoves for our whole lives. And the home we recently moved into has a fancy dancy natural gas stove with star shaped burners.

It is night and day compared to anything else we’ve used before, water boils so much faster, I can actually sear a pen full of vegetables now instead of just making them mushy.

Honestly I love it. I just wish the hood wasn’t so shitty and actually had a hood to capture all of the output from the stove.

PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT

Conveniently missed note above ☝️

The remainder of the executive team is paid what appears to be a fairly reasonable salary for the industry, low even.

The biggest cost ($6mill) is paid by the for profit Mozilla corporation.

Browser development is crazy hard, and expensive, work. Mozilla has honestly done a TON with the resources at hand. Google over here spending hundreds of millions for Chrome

It just sucks that they are seeing financial pressures that drive them into the profit corner.

Turns out when you gotta choose between going defunct and selling ad space, selling ad space wins.

Also turns out that drying up donations for privacy protecting browsers means there is less demand for it, and less money to fund it.

The majority cost of Firefox is engineering salaries.

Eventually something has to give, and this is it.

Hell, even worse, crying in the lost information. Discord is a black hole where community knowledge goes to die.

It’s the worst.

I don’t see it on the app store to remove anymore

Chrome* or Chromium based browsers*

Oof, hell no. That’s some Facebook level cancer right there when they removed downvotes.

It’s just a form of white washing that makes the same people who made up being offended by “black lists” and “master branch”.

Edit: Y’all do realize the irony of exercising your ability to downvote a comment that is defending your ability to downvote?