My search engine article blew up recently, as yet another major publication linked it (yay! /gen), so I made some fixes:

- Moved a couple engines to the graveyard. h/t to dequbed for telling me about moose.at’s demise, and to my broken link checker for telling me about Siik being down for a while now.
- Updated my methodology section to emphasize how I now use word-substitutions to fingerprint an engine’s source. Queries that lend themselves to word-substitution are now my primary approach to uncovering which provider an engine uses for search results, followed by some long-tail queries and search operator support.

The full list of changes is in the Git log.

Things I should add in the future:

- I ought to add a section to describe why I don’t personally like metasearch engines as much as I used to. TLDR: each engine has its own quirks and search operators that I learn to use, and throwing them all on one page forces me to use whatever quirks they have in common. This is really bad for long-tail queries.
- I should put more effort into categorizing engines by strength as well as index size. I’ll have to come up with appropriate terms for things like “ability to find specific pages with specific topics” (less aggressive word substitutions, less focus on semantic search: Mojeek is one of the best at this, Yep is terrible), or “ability to discover pages about a given broad topic” (Yep is good at this once you learn to use it well, but Mojeek isn’t).

That second bullet point is really important. Part of the point of this article is to show that nobody can beat Google at being Google (except perhaps Bing), but we can beat Google at more specific niches.

Originally posted on seirdy.one: See original (POSSE).

RE: https://pleroma.envs.net/objects/df3e74cc-daf2-455a-b14d-56dceba7636b

In light of recent events, some people asked me for VPS advice.

uh

i don’t know what I did to deserve this reputation; it’s been years since i’ve rented from a new provider. i will say:

go wild for your fun projects, but if it’s important:

please oh please check the ToS, SLA, customer support, staff hours, data processing agreement (if it exists), and user reviews (paying special attention to how different providers cancel service) before you pick that too-cheap-to-be-true VPS provider to host your most important projects. If they’re a small provider, see who else uses them (you probably don’t want to share a box with someone too shady).

if you’re hosting a large community or your livelihood, talk to staff before you commit to an upstart provider. ask about any of the above you couldn’t find on your own.

Oh, and use a custom ISO if you’re not familiar with your provider’s customizations to OOTB images. Providers nowadays preconfigure their images a lot with questionable regard for security.

With that preface out of the way: Server Hunter is a great resource for finding new low-cost providers. Remember that below a certain price (like $3/mo), you probably get what you pay for. I won’t pay less than that for anything important with a fixed IPv4.

We should make a compatibility matrix of MastoAPI clients’ feature support beyond vanilla Mastodon. All these clients support sending + rendering reactions:

Web/PWA:

- Whalebird, Fedistar: quotes I think?
- Enafore: quotes, MFM, different posting mimetypes (Markdown, HTML, BBCode, HTML, MFM), bubble timeline
- Mangane: quotes, MFM, different posting mimetypes
- Phanpy (?)

Android:

- Megalodon + Moshidon

iOS:

- Feditext: partial support for rendering quotes.

Flutter:

- Kaiteki: Markdown, maybe posting with different mimetypes?

I know of no clients with reaction support for Freedesktop, macOS, or Windows.

I’ll edit this post as more people make suggestions.

New #blog post: The limited utility of the phrase “GNU/Linux”

Every now and then a fossbro tries to incorrect my terminology and insist I say “GNU/Linux” instead of “Linux”. I wrote this to save myself some time. Instead of engaging with the fossbro, I can just paste this link and wrap up the conversation while they read.

Excerpt:

“A specter is haunting the Linux community. Where lies productive discourse about operating systems, there also lies a danger. For the longer such discourse lasts, the greater the risk that the discourse shall be interrupted by The Interjection: an abomination brandished by a raging fossbro determined to contribute absolutely nothing to the discussion. The standard fossbro interjection begins:

‘I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.’

Sensible retorts, such as “Nobody asked you”, “Please leave us alone”, and “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” are useless defenses. Nay, the greatest weapon against misguided pedantry is pedantry itself.

Let’s talk about why not to use the term “GNU/Linux”.