Enjoy Ecuador!

Wish I was joking… But the first amendment no longer matters, judges orders no longer matter. Your right to a fair trial no longer exists. Your right to peaceful assembly no longer exists.

Take that as you will, but the federal government is no longer following the rules it’s supposed to govern under. And your local police force will happily walk hand in hard with the fascists to violate your rights.

Even better, it’s now a nice database of who companies and governments can go after when they want or need to!

The Internet is just a bunch of servers my dude.

Someone has to pay for them, and all the other infrastructure around them. And with a large part of the world being on the internet a significant portion of their day the costs for even the most efficient centralized services running “at scale” (see: hundreds of millions MAU) are astronomical. In the tens of millions to hundreds of millions of $ annually, just an infrastructure, never mind human resources.

Almost none of these companies survive off of donations. Wikipedia stands out as one that does mainly because they host static content, which is incredibly cost efficient to serve up., and even then their costs are pretty astronomical (there are some debates around their costs of course).

Federated services have an asymmetric scaling problem. A linear growth in users results in a exponential growth in infrastructure costs. While centralized services tend to be almost the entire opposite of that and usually see logarithmic infrastructure costs against linear user growth. Where infrastructure costs are more efficient as their user base grows.

Federated services don’t benefit from running at scale, the more they scale up the less benefit there is to scaling. It’s a really shit situation to be in.

This is why the internet is largely just cyber feudalism. Because the only ones that can afford to host large scaled services for their users are the ones that are making money off of it. And that’s for centralized services, never mind decentralized services which are unbelievably more expensive to host.

I’m coming at this from the standpoint of an engineer, I don’t have answers or solutions, but the first thing we have to do in order to start figuring out solutions is to recognize the problem.

What most people in this thread don’t realize is that what you’re seeing right here is the problem with federated services in this day and age.

Federation protocols and systems just are not mature enough to scale.

Yes you will essentially always have to abandon ship anytime any federated service scales up it’s user base. It will always be entirely unaffordable and unobtainable for randoms to host their own servers because the compute storage and networking requirements will far exceed what most can’t afford.

As an aggregate federated services are always more expensive to host then centralized services. And that cost scales less efficiently than centralized services. Meaning that with linear user growth you get exponential cost growth, and the barrier for entry follows.

Which means that all federated services have to have centralization in order to scale. In their current form.

This is a really tough problem to solve and is going to take a lot of time and money to build good solutions for. Time and money that… You guessed it, is largely funded by profits not donations.

And now we have looped back around.

Let’s not mention the abysmal performance for servers. Making it largely infeasible to scale.

It’s not the solution, not even remotely close, unfortunately.

Definitely not tube archivist…

Development is semi-frozen. The developer is also more hostile and they need to be even to contributions from others.

And it does not store your files in a way that is self-contained. And there is no option to control the naming or organization of the files it stores.

Your file system should be navigatable and understandable without having to run software and pull information from a database in order to interpret it. Tube Archivist is far FAR from ideal media archival software IMHO.

It misses the mark in so many ways it drives me insane.

Except that relay nodes often get out onto proxy lists.

Which means you now get to solve capchas for absoluty f-ing everything now.

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.

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

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.

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