Fedi I have a weird request that is hard to just search for, so I want to crowdfund some suggestions, because what I'm looking for is...weird to even categorize.

I want suggestions for things that are
- Competitive games
- That utilize toys or other physical components (besides, say, just cards or board game pieces)
- That can be customized or tuned in some way

Examples of what I mean, some of which these categories are really the only things they have in common, are:

- Slot cars, mini 4wd, RC car racing
- Bakugan, Beyblade, Bdaman
- Robot fighting

They can either be branded packaged goods, or homebrew/open/freeform kinds of things. But I really love these types of physical object games aside from traditional board games, and I like customizing them, either by having components that can be swapped around for different loadouts, or things that are completely custom.

As many of you know, I posted recently about my experiences and outlook on Kagi, the paid search engine. It's gotten some positive press recently, ironically right after I made my blog post about why I no longer liked or trusted it. This blog post was called "Why I Lost Faith In Kagi" and was a pretty simple quick collection of my thoughts that I primarily wrote so it'd be easier to find again later to link to people when discussing Kagi versus making it a fedi thread I couldn't search for easily later. Across the four social media platforms I linked this blog post on, I'd say it got a total of about 40 likes and few reblogs.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

I say this because this morning I woke up to an email from Kagi's CEO, Vlad, who had seen the post and was upset about it. I have an email address listed on my blog (which is why I didn't bother removing it from these logs), which is what he sent his emails to. I am posting this entire email chain in this thread and will briefly post my thoughts about it, but I feel like it's something that needs to be seen. Please take note of the subject of the email as well (EDIT: It got cropped out sorry, the subject is "Fatih [sic] can not be lost"). Also, since the alt text would get extremely long with some of the transcripts, I've provided a text dump of the emails here for screen reader users and will offer a more abridged description in the alt text: https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt

Cohost's financial update is a poster child for what I and others have been saying for a long time now: the internet won't survive without decentralization. You can't just make the next Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr. That's a joke. Cohost was against decentralization but they've now learned why centralization isn't feasible: only massive corporations with infinite VC can afford it, and they hemorrhage that money and close eventually too.

The internet is too expensive to work this way and it won't long term. We just got complacent while there was enough VC to go around. It's pets dot com again. It doesn't last.

And this isn't even about AP/fedi, while I like fedi this is true with or without it. We have to go back to having websites. Not The(tm) website for whatever, but lots of them. If you don't want to go to more than one? Too bad, it's how things will be regardless. Having One website isn't sustainable for corporations and isn't even vaguely feasible for little guys.

You have to have lots of websites. I can run a small community for a bit of my entertainment budget for the month or donations from a handful of users who like what I'm running. You can run a mastodon instance for a small crowd for very little. You can run a website off an old laptop laying around. You cannot run a 130k user site and pay you and your friends $94k a year to run it. It's not sustainable. I wish it was. It isn't. Sites have to stay small, and there have to be enough of them spread out to spread out the financial load to hobbyist levels. Sorry that you can't make a living running a site for your friends to hang out on, but it's just how the math works out. Reddit can't make money doing it, Twitter can't make money doing it, Patreon can't...they only survive on being Huge Corporations Who Can Bleed Money. You can replicate bleeding money on a small scale all you want but I wouldn't advise it. You can however run a forum for your friends for the cost of Netflix or whatever.