this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I applaud your efforts and I admire your idealism.
Unfortunately, the minute you get the bill from your internet provider, you'll need to find a way to pay for it, and your good intentions will instantly dissolve in the murky realities of modern corporate surveillance capitalism.
But at least while you haven't gotten your first bill, it's refreshing to watch your enthusiasm.
I wonder what a distributed search engine would look like. Basically, the index would be sharded across user computers, and queries would hit some representative sample of that index. This means:
My biggest concern is how to build the index, but if OP is willing to share that, I might start hacking on a distributed version.
Don't start new; contribute to what already exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy
This is really neat and I’m just hearing about it after over twenty years of development. I need to try it out, thank you. How do you stay in the know about this kind of stuff? I’m curious about all the cool stuff out there I wouldn’t even know I’m curious to find.
By being terminally online, I guess?
More concretely, I've spent (probably too much) time on Slashdot, Reddit and now Lemmy over the years (subscribed to Free Software and privacy-related communities in particular). Also, looking through sites like https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ and https://www.privacytools.io/, wiki-walking through articles about Free Software projects on Wikipedia, browsing the Debian repositories, etc.
I'm sure there are plenty of things I haven't heard of either, though.
I was going to mention YaCy as well if nobody else was, so I can chip in to this somewhat. My method is to keep wondering and researching. In this case it was a matter of being interested in alternative search engines and different applications of peer to peer/decentralized technologies that led me to finding this.
So from this you might go: take something you're even passingly interested in, try to find more information about it, and follow whatever tangential trails it leads to. With rare exceptions, there are good chances someone out there on the internet will also have had some interest in whatever it is, asked about it, and written about it.
Also be willing to make throwaway accounts to get into the walled gardens for whatever info might be buried away there and, if you think others may be interested, share it outside of those spaces.