It solves a pretty hard problem that is a self-hosted video platform; a lot of places use YouTube to host videos, even if they aren’t doing so to make money through adsense, this is for their own site material, posting to groupchats, and similar purposes.

Issue is that otherwise you rely on platform owners like Google, who can decide to unperson you, your business, or an employee. It effectively happened to me, YT terminated my channel for unsubstantiated reasons, and hosting my own peertube is likely in the future to replace where I host my decades of video content.

Further, ideologically, we should be collectively moving away from “platforms” for what should be obvious reasons to those of us on the fediverse.

I think it’s “the algorithm”, people basically just want to be force-fed “content” – look how successful TikTok is, largely because it has an algorithm that very quickly narrows down user habits and provides endless distraction.

Mastodon and fediverse alternatives by comparison have very simple feeds and ways to surface content, it simply doesn’t “hook” people the same way, and that’s competition.

On one hand we should probably be doing away with “the algorithm” for reasons not enumerated here for brevity, but on the other hand maybe the fediverse should build something to accommodate this demand, otherwise the non-fedi sites will.

Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.

If they were a small or free service I wouldn’t have much issue, but they do charge, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they at least attempt to scrape the wider web.

Building their own database seems the prudent thing long-term, I don’t doubt they could shore up coverage over Bing. They don’t have to replace the other indexes wholesale, just supplement it.

They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can’t.

Running a scraper doesn’t need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.

Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn’t extremely broad, unfortunately.

I’ve been using Kagi for the last year+.

Personally, I wish they’d tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.

Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they’re limited by their existing index providers, I wish they’d run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.

In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.

At what level? I get a student email from my college (outlook based) as do the professors, though communication is primarily through Canvas. So that’s what I see most often in that context.

I think a lot of people have Gmail incidentally for things like YouTube and other Google account stuff, very few people know you can even bring your own mail.

I still see lots of different emails out there, outlook/hotmail is still huge, yahoo occasionally, icloud in the US.

Among my techy friend circle all of us have either our own self hosted mail, a ‘privacy’ company email, or something in the middle.

All to say, I don’t think it’s that uphill of a battle for the very large percentage of Internet users to accept the way federation works.

Regardless if it was the plan, it’s the result.

I can’t stand what it has become, especially when some of the most problematic subs have massive influence over the rest of the site, like wsb.

Yeah, I was starting to feel a bit crazy with how many were coming out of the woodwork with almost exactly that same wording, even in my city’s sub.

I finally made the move to setting up an account here and wean my reddit usage.

It’s getting so bad on there, so many bots, trolls, and paid agitators. Plus the uptick in fascist apologists. Smaller communities with higher bars to entry produce better conversation, in my experience.

In my experience these “containment” boards/servers/sections tend not to work.

Long term it basically just creates a place that attracts those you don’t want, and becomes place for those ideologies to spread. Then it either gets bad enough they take over (you know the site) or they break off wholesale and form a new community dedicated to those worst impulses (pyrrhic victory at best).

The best policy is to actively moderate, and in the case of the fediverse, defederate, those groups and those that give them shelter.

Somewhat out of scope for this specific article, but in the States’ a lot of cities only make announcements over Tw*tter or Facebook.

I was planning on going to a 4th of July parade with my family, and I only learned it was cancelled (wildfires) because somebody else told me, who was following there, the city website had no mechanism for this kind of news.

Which is really what I’d prefer to see, websites maintained for announcements, and if they want to also post that news on other social media they can use software to crosspost. Also RSS feeds for those who still use readers, plenty of ‘Content Management’ suites provide that functionality by default.

I’m really supportive of this kind of protocol. I’ve long advocated for some system that allowed for micro-payments to support websites, both optional and paywall. We’ve seen what the expectation of having “free” services has gotten us, I’d much prefer to chip in to sites that provide me enjoyment or are informative.