My thoughts exactly. It's stomach-churning to hear people talk about improving search and privacy for all, before putting it behind a prohibitively expensive (and probably inordinately profitable) subscription.
I'll just say the quiet part out-loud: expecting people to pay $10+/month for a search engine is a pipe-dream that rules out 95-98% of the world population. People buy food with that money, they pay rent, they live lives that aren't tethered to a search engine in a meaningful way. Google "wins" their traffic because they don't care, and every bit of friction in-between them and their content is extra work. Kagi's payment-upfront mentality is unrealistic for everyone except the most well-paid Bay Area engineers.
That's not to say I don't understand the "avoid ads at all costs" concept. I do oppose to using anti-advertising sentiments as a populist rallying cry so people will line up at your Search SaaS kiosk and pay you whatever you ask for. At this point you really might as well just invest in your own Searx instance, it's plenty cheaper. And you can't even "dropbox comment" me since there have been third-parties providing search for free since before HN was a website.
> I'll just say the quiet part out-loud: expecting people to pay $10+/month for a search engine is a pipe-dream that rules out 95-98% of the world population.
So what? Why do you get upset about it, when nobody is forcing you to buy it? Most people will not be interested in paying for search, whether they can afford it or not. That's just what a niche product is, most people will not be interested. What I produce in my job is certainly uninteresting for 95-98% of the world population, and the same is probably true for your job.
> Kagi's payment-upfront mentality is unrealistic for everyone except the most well-paid Bay Area engineers.
It's ten dollars.
> At this point you really might as well just invest in your own Searx instance, it's plenty cheaper.
Yes, that might be a good solution for 95-98% of the world population.
> So what? Why do you get upset about it, when nobody is forcing you to buy it?
Because this isn't a solution. Kagi doesn't save people from advertising, it creates a premium workaround and sells it at an arbitrary price per-customer. It's software-as-a-service, a SAAS, built more for the 1,000 true fans rather than the 100,000,000,000 clueless web users. That's just another business - perhaps a kinder and more transparent business - but a sinkhole of regressive moneygrubbing all the same.
> It's ten dollars.
Which is ten dollars more (per month!) than most people pay for a search engine. If you're the sort of person that just flippantly subscribes to that, then yes, you have lost track of the value of a dollar in my eyes. Like I said - you can host your own search engine and pay for your own top-level domain at that kinda price. It's absurd, I'd protest it on-principle even if I was upset with my current search provider.
There's room for this sort of startup in the world, but they've already lost if they don't offer a free tier. Google will hoover up their potential customers like nobody's business until they take the 98% seriously.
It is a business, what did you think? That's why they charge money for their service. Like millions of other businesses, they will never get any significant part of the world's population as users. Why is that a problem to you?
Felt like sharing this given the massive number of complaints around FireFox denying the ability to install add-ons, in another comment thread... never had an issue like that with ESR releases, or IceCat.
Eh, so far in my experience nobody's been shouting across the restaurant or hole-in-the-wall place; normally it's a hand wave or signal, or often a button or bell.
Maybe I haven't been going to exciting places...
And as for taking my order before reading the menu, depends how fast you can decypher the translation of whatever app you use :) (assuming a non-Japanese speaker)
I recognize that this is an advisory post, but I have seen a number of people out there that shout this as a valid reason to not use Mastodon, which I hate, and I feel is such a lazy excuse.
You know what other sites don't have encrypted DMs?
- Twitter
- Facebook Messenger
- Instagram
- TikTok
- YouTube
- Reddit
- LinkedIn
- Email
and on and on.
Basically ANY major site that doesn't explicitly advertise DMs as E2E (or encrypted alone) can just be assumed to NOT be encrypted. So why complain about Mastodon alone then (again, directed at the hypothetical person).
Beyond that, yes it's a bit of an issue where the admins of an instance can read your DMs. If that's a problem, then you yourself can self-host an instance, or find a friend to do so, and enjoy peace of mind.
Or, just use an encryption method like PGP, encrypted online text paste services, saltstack, etc new fangled encryption methods, or send pre-encrypted files hosted on external services.
The lowered level to hosting is the issue though. It's one thing for Facebook Messenger to be unencrypted, Facebook is this whole big faceless company. A random Facebook employee has zero interest in my local gossip of who's sleeping with who because they have no idea who anybody even is. It's another thing to use Mastodon where the instance is run by your cousin Bob who knows who everyone involved is and would really like to read your DMs to get some juicy info to gossip about.
AirBnB works in my opinion best for very remote, or not-tourist travelled places. Where you're going to the island of Sørøya, for example, and there's literally no hotel space or otherwise accommodations available. Unfortunately, big business management companies exist in Norway too... go figure.
