this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
549 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
59589 readers
2936 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's also some minor discussion in the MeFi thread about "federated search" as well.
Self-hosted search also seems like a strong possibility.
The problem that I see with self-hosting is that it isn't a practical reality for most people, due to different tech expertises and machine capabilities. Instead I think that a better system would allow you to simply install some software, and contribute as much as you can while you use it.
I'm not informed on MetaFilter. From your other comment it seems that it's also an indexing site (besides being a community - from their "About" page). Is this correct?
Yes, it's got a really old-school layout, because it's been around since 1999. To me, the fact that they've managed to avoid advertising for 25 years while having the main indexing site as well as things like Ask MetaFilter, IRL meetups, and even a jobs board, it means they've been pretty darn good at managing their finances and figuring out how to support the site long-term without ads. They're also in the process of becoming an actual non-profit organization. They pay their moderators a living wage, because it's a job. That's... pretty amazing.
The comment section takes a bit to get used to, because it's just chronological order of comments, no sorted threads. Very, very old school web ethos. However, if you can get used to it, some really amazing discussion can happen in there.
One of the benefits of the ways MeFi posts work is often you have users doing massive amounts of research and providing literally mountains of links and analysis, you can get pretty lost in the weeds on some posts.
It's been the source of high quality discussions for a long time and there's some really interesting professionals on there who have been staples of the community for a long time. Think hackernews and how many people it has from the industry, but instead of it all being tech people (MeFi has it own share of techies) it is thoughtful and sometimes expert opinion from a large variety of disciplines, as well as first person accounts from people of all walks of life.
It's also where I first found this link (The Man Who Killed Google Search) and decided to post it here.