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2025-04-28 04:26 from IGnatius T Foobar
Subject: Re: search.citadel.org news
Well then I guess it's good that I get the latest SearxNG updates
because the big search engines probably don't enjoy being scraped by
someone who isn't going to serve ads to the user, and I'm guessing they
do an arms race thing there too.
I feel like there ought to be some sort of network for all the people
like us running small services below the radar of big tech.
Lots of search engines are hobby projects with meaningful sophistication. Definitively not up to the standards of comercial search engines, but they have their own strengths and some of them have public apis for you do do your scrapping because why the fuck not. Geeks have to stand together, right?
Marginalia is an interesting one because they try to index hobby sites only. When using it, you have the option to exclude sites with adware, cookies, or javascript. They also exclude AI generated content if the filter gets enabled. And they have an api.
Wiby is like the extremist version. Only pure minimalistic hobby sites get indexed, period. It is fun to use if you want to find random stuff that does not show up in regular searches.
They call that TOR, or i2p, or similar.
below the radar of big tech.
It's a half baked idea, to be sure.
Related to someting i posted in google..
Even now it wont be possible in the 'bigger picture'. Google can, and does, filter anything they want, and FB, same. All one needs to do is piss them off and you effectively vanish. And as i said in the other thread, sure, there are ways around this ( for now ), but when 90% of the people don't know about them its the same result and remain nearly non-existent.
Right. And we are on I2P [uncensored.i2p] for the benefit of those who need to remain anonymous. I'm thinking more in terms of non-anonymous on the clearnet but outside of the reach of goolag and fecesbook. Think of it more like a world of ham radio operators -- completely traceable, but Clear Channel can't mess with them.
It's a half baked idea, to be sure.
Eventually the Streisand Effect kicks in. And at that point the more you try to make something disappear, the more publicity it gets.
And anyway, why should we care about the people who use Google and Facebook? They're boring NPCs who drink Bud Light and get molested by Disney characters. We want the people who can think.
Perhaps not here, but in general as the population shrinks that are not living in the big garden, it does trickle down to the rest of us.
Eventually the Streisand Effect kicks in. And at that point the more you try to make something disappear, the more publicity it gets.
And anyway, why should we care about the people who use Google and Facebook? They're boring NPCs who drink Bud Light and get molested by Disney characters. We want the people who can think.
It's hard to imagine the big garden population at anything other than its peak right now. If anything, it's getting ready to shrink as distrust in Big Tech is finally starting to wane.
The lock-in is quite powerful. And their shady tactics to keep people inside..
It's hard to imagine the big garden population at anything other than its peak right now. If anything, it's getting ready to shrink as distrust in Big Tech is finally starting to wane.
If only.
The more the empire tightens its grip, the more star systems slip through its fingers.
So let's go ahead and take that apart.
Among the technobabble pundits, the phrase "Web 2.0" was being bandied about. Among web developers, the phrase "AJAX" was being used to describe web sites that could update portions of the screen instead of reloading the entire screen. Multi-megabit Internet access for consumers was just beginning to emerge. These were the things that really made the difference in turning the web into a true application platform instead of just an information retrieval system. This was the dream of Marc Andreessen writ large: that the Web would replace Windows as the common delivery platform for applications.
Designs were functional, innovative, and user-driven. There was still a bit of "wild west" in the air, before everyone got herded onto the cattle car to the same four websites, happily accepting the algorithm. Frameworks, surveillance, design-by-committee — same shit, different masters. So if you want to call 2000–2015 the "peak" ... there's a case to be made. It was the last time the mainstream web truly belonged to its builders.
But as you've heard from me countless times before, I refuse to be black-pilled. Here, under the radar of the Nazis of Silicon Valley, the dream is still alive. Through distributed networks, darknets, and other non-mainstream means, we real people are still getting it done — outside the roar of the mainstream, just like we did in the BBS days.
And isn't that the point?