Freelance/Consultant Web Dev, EVE Online Player, Linux/FOSS advocate.
I mean you can avoid all that. If you’re just interested in music and retro games then just use soulseek and use the rom megathread. both of which are going to be either peer to peer or direct downloads. no torrenting.
Rom megathread (web search it) has quite literally everything. no need to search, no need to torrent, it’s all right there. And soulseek with Nicotine+ just works like napster. sign up, be sure to share your music library, and then have at it.
I tried it, paid for it, cancelled it. I tested it with the same queries with ddg, startpage, brave, and qwant via 4get. The results were essentially the same. Kagi did provide more context in the description of the results but it wasn’t anything I would pay a premium for. the majority of features I just didn’t use, the assistant and fastgpt were a waste, lenses were fine and having fediverse on by default is neat but nothing I’d call home about.
If it were cheaper sure, I might stick with it but I can’t justify the price to anyone wanting to use a search engine. $5 for 300 searches a month is a joke. I also don’t like the fact that if you want to pay with something other than a credit card (paypal, venmo, etc) you get charged extra cause Kagi doesn’t want to eat the fees. Also there’s zero option to opt out of paying for the “AI” features, you can turn them off sure…but you’re still going to pay for them.
If your internet usage consists of constant searching and LLM use for searching then sure, you’re going to be paying $10+ a month and be happy with it. But there was nothing Kagi offered that knocked my socks off. if anything, felt like I was getting scammed.
Up until a few weeks ago I was running my own private SearXNG instance and it’s not just you, even I noticed on my OWN instance that it had progressively gotten worse. Initially it was great so I just left it be but then the performance and results just became horrible. It was hit or miss if the thing would even load or not when other instances on my server like my akkoma, piefed, redlib, forgejo, etc all ran smooth as silk.
Eventually I ditched SearXNG and switched to 4get which much better and faster results. thing never goes down and the search results have been fantastic.
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it’s always disappointing when people all about FOSS and shit suggest Proton to people looking to switch from google. no, don’t do that. use Tuta or self host or ANYTHING other than Proton. it’s such a shit company that does not deserve the praise they receive.
yes you’re right but you and I both know they aren’t concerned about that because going back to your first sentence that’s what this is really about but masked as a “won’t anyone think of the children” so it’s easier to swallow (no pun intended)
considering the data is from 2018 and the report published in 2020 it’s probably not a “little” higher but a hell of a lot higher.
At this point it’s more likely bots are advertising/pushing agendas to other bots.
utilizing things like ReviOS or something, by passing the forced account creation, etc.
as everyone else has said soulseek and nicotine+.
If you want to get your spotify playlists from soulseek use this script: https://github.com/fiso64/slsk-batchdl
basically you export your spotify playlists as a csv and slsk-batchdl will take that and try to find everything on soulseek and download it for you. anything it can’t find it’ll let you know. it might take awhile, if you have a server I’d run it on that via screen and just let it run overnight (that’s what I did)
Keep in mind that Soulseek has A LOT of audiophiles on it so you’ll find a lot of high quality audio and FLACs. if FLAC is too big for you and you’re fine with mp3s you c an use Nicotine+ to just search for mp3s.
“Ah - I see the problem now! you’re trying to detain people of color and those spreading political dissent!”
wonder if they received backlash when they transitioned to gpt5. it pretty much “killed” many peoples “partners”.
“Ah - I see the problem now! you’re trying to access xnxx to search for step-sister porn but you’re getting step-mom porn instead! here’s what you typed in the search bar…”
right so you just keep your music folder open so people can do just that. More audiophiles are going to be on soulseek than some random torrent tracker.
I don’t understand why you insist on torrenting when you can’t safely do so. You’re going to get way more traction sharing your rare stuff on soulseek than you will torrenting it I can guarantee that.