I asked chatgpt and it seems to apply to instance owners:
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a data protection law that was implemented by the European Union (EU) to protect the personal data and privacy of individuals within the EU. It applies to both corporations and individuals who process personal data in the context of offering goods or services to individuals in the EU or monitoring the behavior of individuals within the EU, regardless of where the company is located.
So, the GDPR does not only apply to corporations but also to any individual or organization that handles personal data of individuals within the EU, irrespective of their size or location. This means that even small businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals who process personal data falling within the scope of the GDPR must comply with its provisions.
It’s not too hard. The most important things are web search and email. I still use Google Maps. But I don’t want my private emails and searches at a company who is user hostile and preditory.
I agree with your point of view but there is nothing that can be done about it.
It does feel sad to see one giant instance have almost all users and all traffic for me too. I was hoping it would become a proper decentralized platform with hundreds of islands of different servers filled with people and communities.
But fine, we don’t always get what we want. I’m disappointed but will keep using Lemmy anyway. It’s not a big tech service at least which is wonderful, and most people are nice.
I don’t think gdpr is required when it’s not a company running the instances? We have 1389 instances running now, rented or owned by individuals. Interesting point though, wonder if gdpr applies still.
And if an instance is hosted in America, does it still apply? It seems many advertising companies are avoiding Europe because there is privacy laws like gdpr.
I also worry a bit about all these email aliases I use now. They do tie me to fastmail for the future. And if they would disappear, it would be a pain to replace. But that’s life. Have to take some risks. :)
Yup try it and set as default in the browser. You will start to see a lot of sites that never showed up in google also. They have these “listacles” in search results where they group relevant sites into a small list, which makes it super simple to go to them for results.
If you want a sample search, try “best tv shows 2023” or something like that.
For email, Fastmail is just excellent. I use their email aliases function a lot. So you can one-click generate an email to use when you sign up on a service and when you don’t use that service anymore, delete the email address.
Makes it impossible for them to sign you up on advertising lists since you can just delete that email address if they annoy you.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood you. Yes they count as a search.
I don’t think you can compare pricing to Google. They make profits by combining any payment with selling your data for profit. There is no way Kagi can compete with that since they don’t sell your data.
To me, search is the most important thing I use the internet for. I just think it’s reasonable to pay a good competitor that doesn’t sell your data and provides excellent search. But if you can’t pay them, of course that’s fine. Maybe you need 10 dollars for something else. But for me, Im not in the financial zone where I even miss 10 dollars or notice it’s gone.
I understand if you can’t afford it. Money doesn’t grow on trees in this world. But Kagi has been very transparent about the reason for the costs - it’s what they need to charge to not lose money, since they don’t sell your user data or track you.
It’s unrealistic to think that having a search engine is free, and the reason Google is free is because it tracks you and sells your data to advertisers, and probably also makes sure you get search results that benefit those advertisers. It’s quite simply a bad choice to use an ad company to search the web.
Kagi also had a blog post about search usage, where they used googles search statistics to determine that the average person searches 3 or 4 times per day (90 to 120 times per month). This amount (100 searches) is free on Kagi.
300 searches costs 5 dollars.
If you are doing 1000 searches per month, that’s as much as myself and I work as a programmer / devops guy. We search a lot. That’s much more than the average person. We are in the top 1% actually. Nice to be there for something right? :) Cost for us is 10 dollars.
I couldn’t find anything about your claim that conversion would cost extra, not on the pricing page and not in the FAQ section. I also did a few conversation searches and there was no info about additional price. Can you link to where it says that?