Yeah. Every search engine makes a decision about what to show to you and in what order; it’s simply not possible to show you everything with equal priority. This means no search engine offers a truly neutral search, there can always be bias in it.

The only thing I’d worry about over other search engines was if Duck Duck Go was systematically removing search results based on keywords, like if they were trying to make it never show results about the Holocaust or Tienanmen Square or so on even when those are explicitly searched for, or to only show results on certain topics from a tiny handful of selected sources. But I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest Duck Duck Go is doing this.

I wonder if there is a country or municipality somewhere where the busses are purple. They can’t all be yellow, surely.

Yeah, it’s barely working for me at all, and I’ve been trying it for at least a week now. Sometimes I’ve written out long comments only for them to just vanish forever with a little error message.

Even when you understand all that, though, it does just feel weird and unintuitive that you have to search for the community you want to interact with from within your home instance, and can’t just directly go to that instance’s website, e.g. beehaw.org, and log in.

Having an app (including a desktop app) to point people to that would just consolidate everything for a given user so that it’s more intuitive, and so that you can easily switch between accounts or set it up to see posts from all your accounts together, would make it a lot easier on newbies, and make navigation more convenient for everyone else as well.

There is also currently no advertising incentive for tracking user data, since there are no ads. Ublock Origin extension blocks 0 things here, which is a marvel on the internet.

I think it’d be possible in future for corporations to make their own federated instances, and those might have ads and/or more tracking? I’m no expert though.

I think there are trade-offs, but overall I feel good about it compared to all the corporate social media sites that we know are tracking and selling data, refusing to delete data, etc.