[foxfluff]

People could certainly run hand-curated indexes and search engines seeded by such. I think marginalia.nu search behaves somewhat like that.

I'm really interested in the idea of decentralized search where everyone has the power to choose for themselves who to trust.

> How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?

Making them turn off the lights is the goal. Good riddance I say, once we get there.

[foobarian]

> Making them turn off the lights is the goal. Good riddance I say, once we get there.

I wish there was some middle ground. Think of all the useful Youtube videos showing how to play an instrument, do woodworking projects, fix cars... there is a vast amount of knowledge there. Maybe YT should be nationalized :-)

[rileyphone]

Youtubes early success was due to being a free video hosting platform, the monetization just led to the rise of 10:04 long videos. In any case most larger creators will put sponsorships in band like the good ol days. I’m hoping decentralized alternatives can take over like Peertube or Odysee, but I do also appreciate the more traditional business model of Vimeo.

[Lascaille]

> People could certainly run hand-curated indexes

Do you think there's a lot of good content out there left to index?

[marginalia_nu]

I've had no problem finding sites to index with my search engine. Like it's tiny compared to Google today, but it's about the same size they were when they first started out. Leads me to think there's probably as much, or more now as there ever was. There's just more noise to go with it.

[foxfluff]

Yep! There's a massive amount of useful content on the web. A lot of it is just a pain to find right now, because the quality of search is bad and the amount of garbage is a thousandfold greater.

It's true that walled gardens have been eating up useful information and that is a real shame, but make no mistake: there's still a ridiculous amount of good stuff on the open web. They're not playing the SEO optimization game so they get buried.

[Lascaille]

That actually has made me feel a lot more positive than I would have imagined.

I have sort of got stuck in this bubble of reddit and not much else and... the way people behave has really sapped my desire to contribute anything to the world. I'm looking around me at the opinions a lot of people are expressing and I think... no, these people don't deserve nice things. It seems sometimes like the whole world is full of venal, bitter and divisive people that do nothing but snap bitterly at the heels of anyone that makes something of themselves or strays too far from safe consensus.