Made me feel a little unwell at the beginning as well, but considering that the search is one of the main, key features I use daily, multiple times, it is totally worth it.

I pay for a search engine, but:

• High quality search results
• No ads
• High customizability
• No weird SEO optimized Website results which help me not at all and I lose hours in a year clicking them by accident
• Did I mention no ads or sponsored content?

Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used.

Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.

And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.

Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.

Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.

Oh, yes, there is - there will be a season 8 and 9.

The new episode of season 8 starts July 25 and continues weekly.

That’s what I expect to happen as well. Nothing stops them from kicking out the current mods / admins, replacing them with new mods willing to take over and continue as before (or even use AI moderation tools to minimize the efforts).

That’s what I wonder as well. Probably they’ll be satisfied with bringing down the Invidious project website, including their documentation and installation files.

Lemmy is more of a Reddit alternative, where you have the focus on communities/categories (similar to “subreddits”) to which you can subscribe to, while Mastodon is more a Twitter alternative, focusing on users to follow.

Kbin is actually slightly special.

It is also running on the Fediverse network, but can communicate with multiple other services. Meaning, it can show you content from all Lemmy instances (called Threads) and content from Mastodon (called Microblog). You can see this thread there as well.

By using Kbin, you have access to both worlds, Lemmy and Mastodon. In addition, it supports even more of the so-called “ActivityPub” services, like Pleroma or Peertube.

While I love the implementation of Kbin, it still has small hiccups here and there - it feels less reliable/stable. Some content isn’t fully updated, like this post missing most of the comments at the time I posted this. They even warn you about it: “The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.”

I had the best experience so far by using a Lemmy instance for Lemmy and a Mastodon instance for Mastodon. Waiting for Kbin to be more mature.

This is a critical feature missing. Especially considering when one instance goes down, so does your account.

If announced, we should be able to easily transfer the account.

But an instance might also go down unannounced (especially now with so many hosting instances just for fun or to experiment with it).

While in such a case your posts and comments on this local instance will be gone, there needs to be a way to recover your account on another instance with all your posts and comments made on other instances still connected to your account, being editable or deletable.

There isn’t much left.

First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.

Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.

Discord had a few changes the community didn’t like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.

YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn’t any competition which is urgently needed.

UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.

Which other big social media platforms are left?