Personally, I think it’s great. It’s a smaller community than HN and the registration requirements, whilst not a perfect solution, do create a litmus test and ultimately creates an envrionment of mostly high quality posting.

To get in, you need to be invited in by an existing user. If you don’t know anybody, you can hang around on their IRC channel and once you’re familiar, somebody may be willing to invite you.

Another vote here for Fastmail. I also like Posteo, Mailbox and mxroute, but these are not as fully featured - which may be perfect for you if you’re after email only. What I really like about Fastmail is that on top of being a customer-focused business (rather than a customer is the product business), they offer a really snappy web interface with excellent search - and they are extremely compliant with email standards, building everything on JMAP.

I do not like Proton or Tutanota. I have used both, including using Proton as my main email account for the past two years. I do believe they are probably the best when it comes to encryption and privacy standards, but for me it’s at far too much cost. Encrypted email is almost pointless - the moment you email someone who isn’t using a Proton (or PGP encryption), then the encryption is lost. Or even if they just forward an email to someone outside your chain. I would argue that if you need to send a message to someone with enough sensitivity to require this level of encryption, email is the wrong choice of protocol.

For all that Proton offer, it results in broken email standard compliance, awful search capability and reliance on bridge software or being limited to their WebUI and apps. And it’s a shame, because I really like the company and their mission.

I particularly enjoyed a recent company meeting that spent considerable time talking about the importance of flow state. It had an awkward pregnant pause when someone (usually very quiet) unmuted to ask, “is the policy to increase the number of days we must spend in our open-plan office kind of undermining this?”. Literally all of our directors just shifted on their seats hoping another would answer that.

Eventually, HR director stated “Not at all, that’s what headphones are for!”

Which was particularly delightful, as our tech director had only 20 minutes before stated how he would like to discourage people sitting in the office in silos with their headphones on.

Well, the reality is, search costs money. Quite a lot of money it seems.

So that is either paid for by you, or by someone else. Nobody is going to run search as a charity. So it’s going to be paid for by parties interested in paying for your attention.

Even if you run ad blockers or use meta search engines like searx, you are going to be finding results by companies that have paid to be there.

I am a heavy search user. My search quantity is reasonably large just from personal use (I’m a curious dude, what can I say?) but my professional use of search as a software developer is staggering some days. My anecdotal experience is that that Google search has been declining in quality for years, and especially over the last two or three. DuckDuckGo is a nice alternative for privacy (potentially), but I while I find myself feeling less in a walled garden with them, I don’t actually find their results to be any better than Google’s.

I have tried Kagi recently. So far, I really like it. I genuinely feel like I get good results (read: find something quickly that is relevant to what I searched). I love their lensed searches that let you search the indie-web, and I love that they let you add weightings to websites that you trust.

It is expensive, no doubt. But for a certain audience that relies on quality web search, prefers to not be walled in by paying search engine optimizers and values paying for a product rather than opting to be the product, Kagi offers a solution.

Having said that, I would love to see the cost come down and make it more accessible to the many and I appreciate that for most people, the “free” search engines are good enough.

I default to DuckDuckGo as well. I don’t really like it, and I certainly don’t trust it any more than I do any other for-profit organization. I just wanted something that isn’t Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

It’s really quite fruitless though. Maybe 80% of my searches end up having a !s or !g (really just for variety…) thrown in, as Google’s results are just better.

DDG image search spits out porn as often as it does something relevant. I can change content moderation options if I want to reduce it, but I don’t have to do that with Google.

Kagi has caught my attention lately. I’m going to try it and see if it feels good value for the money. I’m not opposed to paying for search, but this does feel expensive (I say that having no idea of the true cost of running a search company). Obviously, privacy is out the window as it’s paid for and linked to an account. But as I feel I’m not really getting that anywhere else either, I’m more hoping that it will just provide good search results.