I’m not sure why that’s a conceptual hurdle. Electromagnetic radiation, including the visible light spectrum, is one of the primary methods in which we gather data about and interpret the universe. To say that the matter is “dark” is to say that it’s not detectable on the electromagnetic spectrum to us as we know it.

It’s not an uncommon turn of phrase, it’s the same reasoning for the colloquial term “going dark” regarding radio communication silence.

To say that it’s “invisible” or “clear” would imply the existence of some property causing it to be so. This would also imply the presence of interpretable data in order to term it as such, when in truth none exists. You could perhaps say “unknown” but then that’s truly arbitrary, “dark” at least implies the opposite of “light”, i.e. detectable and serves a conjectural purpose in that sense.

Weird, they do, but they redirect for me and the final URL is different than what you pasted.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html

My best guess is that a DNS record is messed up on their end, and since I’ve been to those pages before relatively recently, the cname or A-record is still cached for me.

Hmm I just checked, they’re all live and their status page for each link has no outages. I would check any content blockers etc. that you have, I suspect it’s a problem on your end. They do use different domains for their blog, feedback, and help KB etc.

Kagi does exactly what you’re describing. It’s what I’ve been using.

You’re right, and that model actually forced/encouraged development and innovation of the software. If they didn’t make it compelling, no one would buy the new version. Now with the subscription model, these companies don’t need to do anything more than putting a new shade of lipgloss on it every year, they have a captive audience. They can basically pull a Valve and just patch security flaws.

Right there with ya! GameCube has always been my favorite. It also has the best iterations of Kart and Smash imo. I’ve recently been acquiring more GBA games to play on the adapter which is a fun time.

A tip for anyone who has the DOL-001 version with the digital output: you can easily get and adapter to HDMI, and there’s a company that now makes a USB-drive sized signal processor that does some upscaling and anti-aliasing. I’m now able to play on my 4k TV with a 1080p signal. Anyone feel free to DM me for the details!

I’m not saying a big old CRT isn’t still the best experience, but this lets me play on my main TV which is great for party games.

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?

This is good news! And we/they should keep pushing for more, everywhere. Good for IBEW for continuing the pressure.

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.

Also it’s dev, singular. Kbin has been put together by only one dev. I personally find that damn impressive considering it’s functionally on par with Lemmy being only 2 months old to Lemmy’s 4 years.

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.

You bet! The fediverse is definitely a confusing concept to wrap your head around the first time. And it doesn’t help that different software server instances don’t need to use a site name that specifies which software they are (like Beehaw, for example).

It depends on what you mean by other servers…Lemmy instances? I haven’t seen any differences between kbin instances.

Kbin is entirely different software from Lemmy; it’s a completely different backend.

So that would be why it’s “better” in that regard than Lemmy instances. My understanding is that it’s a bug in Lemmy that will be fixed soon.

The “popping” of the feed in Lemmy is tied to their use of websockets instead of http. I believe the devs stated they’ll be moving off of websockets in the future.

This must be a Lemmy thing right? I haven’t experienced this at all on kbin.

Thank you, I think you’re right! I misread it for sure.

Small correction. Kbin is not a Lemmy instance. It’s an entirely different backend on the ActivityPub protocol. It federates with “threaded” fediverse sites like Lemmy, and with microblogging sites like Mastodon. Users on kbin can create and interact with both kinds of posts and kbin magazines “Lemmy communities” can natively include both.

Edit: sorry @atypicaloddity I totally misread your comment. Ignore me!