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.

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.

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