Searx aggregates different search engines. YaCy is peer-to-peer engine that can run its own crawlers to index content, and query other peers for their content. Looks like Searx has YaCy-integration available, so you could run a local YaCy-node and get its results added to your Searx results.
I don't know why it seems odd to you, it is literally what Keybase has been about since its start: the point is that you can bootstrap trust by linking to multiple already known identities (like twitter, hn, github) in a secure way. Even if you dislike all the other things Keybase has done since, this is a significant improvement over web-of-trust or TOFU.
It should be trivially verifiable by yourself: just watch what requests your device is making. And the app itself is open source, so you should be able to trust it.
While decentralized protocols don't entirely prevent centralization, they're still better than if the protocol was centralized. While Facebook and Google exist, we can still make websites. While most people use Gmail, we can still run our own mail servers.
Even if 90% of users use the centralized service, the protocol being open gives enormous value to the remaining 10%. And as long as the 10% keep the protocol open, the _possibility_ of decentralization can keep the centralized services honest.
We only need to keep the googles of the world from completely shutting down the open protocols. I mean, even that can get hard, but it's still entirely reasonable goall.
I think it's interesting that the parent included Mastodon on their list, because it certainly has a very pro- safe space culture, despite it being very tempting alternative to people rejected from centralized Twitter. Mastodon has very strong tools for moderation, and the more "free speech"-aligned instances are quickly blocked from interacting with the main network.
In addition to the other replies: one big draw of specific servers/instances is the local timeline, a feed of every post on a server. While you can connect to anyone, discovering new people is much easier on the same instance. For this reason people prefer small, specific instances.
The Mastodon culture is also fairly opposed to large instances. Mastodon.social (the "flagship") is widely criticised for allowing itself to grow much larger than other instances. The community prefers small, homely intantances, median size is probably about 500 users, like this one. This may seem weird to outsiders, but instances like this one are one of the main draws of Mastodon.
Reader mode is definitely a very important part of the modern web experience. A rather sad truth.
I recently also found a Firefox extension [1] I'd been looking for a some time: a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com. This makes browsing Medium much nicer.
> Stellar isn't decentralized. Just like Ripple, it uses Federated Byzantine Agreement, which means that nodes use a list of other nodes they trust. The fact that this scheme has nothing to do with the concept of a decentralized cryptocurrency
There is no centralized authority, which means that the protocol in decentralized. It's just not decentralized in exactly the same way as something like Bitcoin. Some might call that a good thing.
> blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people
But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.
Does anyone know how widely these are actually used?
When looking at the video, the key looked very "old fashioned", and I thought that surely they're not widely used anymore. In Finland, most locks are something called (after quick look to Wikipedia) disc tumbler lock, and I hadn't really thought about how common they're elsewhere.
