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

Definitely never trip nearby while carrying some attack. I heard that does terrible things to cured epoxy and panel glue.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.