Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au

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  • 106 Posts
  • 156 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 5th, 2022

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  • @makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.

    At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.

    The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.

    For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.

    For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.

    And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.

    (Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)

    (Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)

    In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.



  • @sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

    There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

    WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

    Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

    WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

    As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.















  • @alcoholicorn Yeah, that’s not how it tends to work in Australia.

    What happens is a state government puts up a good chunk of time construction costs (as much as half in some cases), plus public land.

    In some cases, the freeway already exists, but the state government wants one more lane built, because it thinks that will ease congestion (as happened with sections of the Tullamarine and Monash Freeways in Melbourne).

    It gets handed off to Transurban, who builds it under a long-term operating agreement (30 years is common).

    In some cases, the agreements have clauses saying railways that compete with the toll road can’t be built.

    As the end of the lease approaches, Transurban offers to build one more lane — in exchange for extending the agreement.