Being an idiot in a hurry, I saw the medication Warfarin

It sounds like you’re thinking there is no way to compete with Reddit. If you charge, people will use Reddit. If you have ads, people will use Reddit. People are only here because there aren’t ads and it’s free?

If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There’s no reason instances can’t use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I’ll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.

That’s not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn’t very scalable.

The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertisers, it must come from users.

There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It’s only fair.

Of course if one truly can’t afford it, paying for search can seem a luxury.

However I would argue as a counterpoint; If there’s any online service one would consider paying for, it should be search. Search is most literally our “front page to the internet”. It’s our first stop in any quest for information. Even the founders of Google knew early on, that putting adds in search creates a perverse incentive against the best results, favoring instead worse results, so people perform more searches, creating more opportunities to show people adds.

$5 a month isn’t much to know your query will give the results you want, instead of the results advertisers want.

Do you mean Reddit the company, or the Reddit the community?

I think the answers are “No”, and “A little. It often gets deleted when mentioned.”

Part of me hates myself for asking this. You clearly put a lot of effort into this.

Why? There are at least a couple actual blogging options with ActivityPub support. Why try to force Lemmy into something it isn’t.

That’s what the local feed is for.
I’m constantly surprised by people who don’t seem to understand what ALL means.

You’re speculating that Kagi is actually astroturfing on Lemmy. That’s why I asked for an account you believe to be doing it on Kagi’s behalf.

So yah, the social media manager or marketing agency is getting paid. People organically posting because they genuinely like the service, aren’t. The former would be advertising. The later not.

Can you point to any accounts you think are doing Kagi astroturfing. IE being paid to advertise with. Because now it just sounds like you’re speculating.

If they aren’t paying anyone is it advertising? I’m not sure what you’re actually talking about anymore. Maybe I never did

Should I ask them about being paid? I’ve been doing it for free all this time.

I associate the word with money related activities

That’s a good thing. It costs money to provide services to people. The Fediverse is no different.

I’m not sure they do at all. There are just a bunch of Kagi users here.

That sounds good.
I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be able to interoperate at all. Just that this kind of thing isn’t, and never will be ideal. I’m pushing back on the idea, that one account for all the Fediverse is the best and greatest, that everyone should be striving for that goal.

It’s a principal of reality. Trying to make something that can do everything, will mean it’s not great at anything. Specialization is what allows society to grow to what it is. The Fediverse is no different.

That’s entirely dependent on the interface switching, or some kind of universal interface. That’s the part I have serous doubts about. Keep in mind you have to make a single interface that work better than all the others on their respective native systems. I’m not sure that’s possible.

That would be cool. Might be useful. Not sure it’s really possible.

Which I would never respond to on Mastodon, as it’s terrible for discussions.

I follow topics and have discussions on Lemmy, keep up with individuals and announcements on Mastodon, and look at cool photos on Pixelfed.
None of my accounts are following anything on other systems.

The reason I’m in this community is for discussions like this. We disagree on the nature of using he fundamental architecture of the Fediverse.
I think using Mastodon to engage in Lemmy discussions is extremely awkward without the threading to keep it all organized. Equally, Lemmy is designed specifically around following communities. Following individuals on Mastodon breaks the pattern of the feed. And good luck following either Mastodon accounts or Lemmy groups in Pixelfed.

However, having multiple decentralized servers within each system, is plenty of reason for the Fediverse to be better than a centralized platform. They don’t Need to interoperate with each other.