SpacemanSpiff

I use Kagi too, it’s surprisingly snappy! Like seriously impressive for a small org. They talk about speed optimisation being critical for them as well. I find the result to be excellent as well. A true Google replacement/feels like Google in its prime.

I believe they have their own index and bot as well?

Right but Kbin doesn’t defederate with many if anyone right now. You can also block entire instances as an individual user so defederation is less important in Kbin.

Are you talking about Lemmy for that testing? On Kbin I regularly see communities with no Kbin users subbed, just a large amount of upvotes. The algorithm for “hot” content on the all feed works much better on Kbin right now. Subbing to an any community is easy on Kbin. You just open it via a link and tap the menu to bring up controls for the magazine/community.

Genuine question here, how can Lemmy have more content if it’s all federated? Wouldn’t Kbin, despite being much younger, have all the same content?

Yes….on a technical level. But the picture is bigger than that. Personally, I have a hunch that the choice of Rust is making Lemmy’s development slower. This seemed to be evidenced by the fact that Kbin has more functionality than Lemmy while having only been around for 2 months. Vs Lemmy’s 4 years. The Kbin dev has also been much more able to fix things on the fly during the surge in users. Whereas Lemmy will supposedly move off websocket use any day now.

Adoptability isn’t something to be discounted. The fact that there any more people out there familiar with PHP may give Kbin an edge over time. And let’s be honest, in real-world test PHP can very often be faster then - less-than-mature-Rust codebase.

Really? Kbin as the name is what intrigued me initially over Lemmy. It’s actually inspired by Linux, the sbin directory to be specific.

Kind of like how Lemmy made up communities? Lol you don’t call microblogs “toots” either. Seems every fediverse software has their own terminology.

They do have their own crawler and I believe supplement from bing only when necessary. Something like 98% of results are from their own index across all users. They actually have a breakdown for every search.

I think they actually have the largest independent index outside of Google/Bing right now.

Others that exclusively use their own index are:

Mojeek (results aren’t great)
Kagi (result are pretty good imo)

I understand your idea, but I think it would defeat the purpose of the fediverse. It would create single points of failure that are un-correctable.

I also think many people forget that Reddit never functioned any differently. Everyone seems to have forgotten (and I’m not saying you have!) that there are and were always multiple subreddits for any given topic. With slightly differing names. The only reason people are forgetting this is because eventually one or a handful became pre-eminent and the others died or became transformed into something more niche.

I think it’s a problem that will ultimately correct itself, but I think a tags based system, like hashtags in Mastodon, would be a better solution for tying communities/magazines together through metadata.

I think it’s a fair point. They won’t be able to remain federated to many instances if their point of contention is open-enrollment.

I understand needing the Lemmy moderation tools to improve and that it’s temporary, but the damage to their own communities and users may not be temporary.

Their users will turn inward and end up preferring their own communities—which is fine. However it also means that non-beehaw users will shy away from those communities in favour of others, lest their home site get de-federated at some point for the same reasons. These effects combined means slow-to-grow, low-visibility communities in the fediverse, and increases the chance that their communities may dwindle if others of the same subject become pre-eminent outside of Beehaw.

In short, while I understand their reasons, I think that it risks making Beehaw.org permanently insular and ultimately much more similar to a non-fediverse website.

I think Google peaked about 6-8 years ago now and then started slipping at an ever accelerating rate.

It’s almost useless for me when searching anything remotely technical or otherwise niche.

I almost consistently need to go to the second page of results now, something I don’t remember doing since like 2009.

I find Bing acceptable. Brave search works well. But I’m actually using Kagi now since I’m hoping their paid model will actually mean I’m not the product.