Always has been.
Right beside the fact that their monetary model relies on user activity tracking. Yet they advertise privacy.
A browser that had a seemingly unlimited budget for advertising before it even had users is suspicious as hell.
I’ve never trusted brave.
It is, though the numbers are depressing.
A site like Reddit grows in its daily active users more than 15x (!!!) entire MAU base of Lemmy. “Reddit migrations” are barely a margin of error for them.
This is excluding, liberal, assumption of bot counts.
The Internet is just a bunch of servers my dude.
Someone has to pay for them, and all the other infrastructure around them. And with a large part of the world being on the internet a significant portion of their day the costs for even the most efficient centralized services running “at scale” (see: hundreds of millions MAU) are astronomical. In the tens of millions to hundreds of millions of $ annually, just an infrastructure, never mind human resources.
Almost none of these companies survive off of donations. Wikipedia stands out as one that does mainly because they host static content, which is incredibly cost efficient to serve up., and even then their costs are pretty astronomical (there are some debates around their costs of course).
Federated services have an asymmetric scaling problem. A linear growth in users results in a exponential growth in infrastructure costs. While centralized services tend to be almost the entire opposite of that and usually see logarithmic infrastructure costs against linear user growth. Where infrastructure costs are more efficient as their user base grows.
Federated services don’t benefit from running at scale, the more they scale up the less benefit there is to scaling. It’s a really shit situation to be in.
This is why the internet is largely just cyber feudalism. Because the only ones that can afford to host large scaled services for their users are the ones that are making money off of it. And that’s for centralized services, never mind decentralized services which are unbelievably more expensive to host.
I’m coming at this from the standpoint of an engineer, I don’t have answers or solutions, but the first thing we have to do in order to start figuring out solutions is to recognize the problem.
What most people in this thread don’t realize is that what you’re seeing right here is the problem with federated services in this day and age.
Federation protocols and systems just are not mature enough to scale.
Yes you will essentially always have to abandon ship anytime any federated service scales up it’s user base. It will always be entirely unaffordable and unobtainable for randoms to host their own servers because the compute storage and networking requirements will far exceed what most can’t afford.
As an aggregate federated services are always more expensive to host then centralized services. And that cost scales less efficiently than centralized services. Meaning that with linear user growth you get exponential cost growth, and the barrier for entry follows.
Which means that all federated services have to have centralization in order to scale. In their current form.
This is a really tough problem to solve and is going to take a lot of time and money to build good solutions for. Time and money that… You guessed it, is largely funded by profits not donations.
And now we have looped back around.
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.
How’s the FCC going to prepare for anything when it’s being gutted?
What advertising?
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
Naw, stupid easy for automated systems to clean up.
Your life, activities, and habits will be mined by machines in order to target to and to adjust and mold your habits to best fit your masters whoever wants your loyalty in ways sometimes imperceptible to you.
Consumed by companies and governments alike to target people both for monitization, and for enforcement action against the laws or political views at the time. Purchased by employers or potential employers to monitor and analyze your personal life and habits, to determine whether you are or are going to be a good worker bee. Shared with health providers and insurance companies so they can determine how and when they need to deny you service or care.
Mentioned something bad about the company CEO on the drive? Shouldn’t have done that. Talked about a pre-existing condition with your spouse? Shouldn’t have done that. Talked about your kids mental health problems in the car? Welp, now anyone with $ knows too for the rest of their life.
You don’t want your detailed data in the hands of tyrants, it will be used against you or others near you.
(Yes, everything I mentioned here already happens to some degree, yes employers can and do purchase your data from data brokers to judge your personal life. Yes health insurance will do everything within their power to deny anything they can)
PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT
Conveniently missed note above ☝️
The remainder of the executive team is paid what appears to be a fairly reasonable salary for the industry, low even.
The biggest cost ($6mill) is paid by the for profit Mozilla corporation.
Browser development is crazy hard, and expensive, work. Mozilla has honestly done a TON with the resources at hand. Google over here spending hundreds of millions for Chrome
It just sucks that they are seeing financial pressures that drive them into the profit corner.
Removed by mod
Turns out when you gotta choose between going defunct and selling ad space, selling ad space wins.
Also turns out that drying up donations for privacy protecting browsers means there is less demand for it, and less money to fund it.
The majority cost of Firefox is engineering salaries.
Eventually something has to give, and this is it.
Hell, even worse, crying in the lost information. Discord is a black hole where community knowledge goes to die.
It’s the worst.
I don’t see it on the app store to remove anymore
Chrome* or Chromium based browsers*
Protocols are much more difficult to create and implement.
The barrier for technical ability and maturity is much higher. Which is why you don’t see them as often, and when you do see them they tend to suck, have massive gaps, or some other significant failing that prevents them from really scaling out.
Building reliable and robust protocols with a hobby project is a nearly impossible task, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of minds over a long period of time to settle on the specifications. And just as long to actually implement it.
Usually this requires some sort of funding and dedicated resources from the get-go. Which many of these projects lack.
And funded by who?
It’s nice to say that it should be decentralized, but who is funding the development of that? Are you donating to IA?