Running the service itself over Tor is the only way to prevent local governments knocking on the admin’s door, though

Hard agree. Decentralization itself doesn’t really work against censorship, you need an additional layer of privacy, or, more ideally, anonymity. Is there a way of running a lemmy instance over Tor?

AFAIK the algorithm for Kagi is really alien compared to Google and Bing/DDG, so the results do look a little weird at first, the main difference being just the sheer reduction in quantity of results.
But I guess if you didn’t like it, you didn’t. Maybe it is worse and I’m biased because I already paid

Forgot to mention that it unfortunately is a US-owned company, so it would be off the table for the full-on US boycott crowd, especially because it’s a paid service.
Though they seem to be a genuinely good company that consistenly provides good customer support and improves the product in tangible ways. Privacy Pass was implemented because of customer feedback, for example, and so were crypto payments, and both were publicly discussed on the forums with good transparency. They also actively promote the decentralization of the internet: with that Small Web feature I mentioned, with Fediverse and Usenet Archives search being implemented by default, by providing an interface to use any LLM model through their assistant… So I wouldn’t want to boycott them, and I don’t

Can’t disagree here, this would be great

I switched to Kagi and am beyond satisfied. If your goal is to strictly degoogle, it fits the bill, but it still does if you are looking for better privacy, as it now comes with an implementation of Privacy Pass. The algorithm is leagues above Google’s and DDGs, IMO, and the “lens” feature allows you to seamlessly filter the results to specialized sources, including the Fediverse. “Small web” is a fun feature for when you’re bored running unit tests at work, too

I don’t know about stopping entirely. I built a pretty cool RAG system for internal use in my company, it very much facilitates navigating very large amounts of text data.

Yup, and the arguments are so weirdly self centered, too. “I went through so much when I started college, what would I talk about with someone in HIGH SCHOOL?” (19-17 gap) Dude, you started smoking pot and went to a few frat parties, it’s not that deep. Also are these people just always discussing life experiences for some reason? No shared interests, hobby groups, common acquaintances?

Reddit would be outraged about an 18 yo dating a 16 yo, though. Some people have really weird and unrealistic views on this