SpacemanSpiff

@writeblankspace

I agree, I have no idea how much karma I had on my account and I never looked or paid attention.

I’ve never been sure if all the chatter about it is people actually caring, or if it was always mostly a joke.

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?

I’m actually hoping that at some point we may have an automatic translation for content not in our chosen language. The way Mastodon does. I want to understand what the threads and comments in other languages are saying! I feel like it broadens understanding.

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 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).

I think the “dynamic updates” behaviour is tied to Lemmy’s use of websockets instead of http. Kbin uses http. The Lemmy devs have stated they’re going to move off of websockets in the future as they present scaling issues with the way the software is written.

The websocket protocol allows bi-directional push communication regardless of the previous request which means that new posts are constantly triggering server side updates which then appear like a page “refresh” on clients.

Arguably, while websockets have very cool realtime features compared to http, for a Reddit-like content aggregate their use can quickly overwhelm usability without significant retooling.

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 is really no different than Reddit. There have always been multiple subreddits for the same topic, with slightly different names. Many were created because the “originals” were found lacking at some point.

There’s nothing wrong with people having multiple options. We may eventually end up in a situation like Reddit where certain magazines/communities of the same topic are more trafficked than others and the less trafficked ones “die”.

I think there’s going to be a kind of lifecycle thing that comes with these things. They’ll sort of naturally sort themselves out. To artificially guide it one way or the other would be to imitate the mistakes of Reddit or past aggregate sites.