Comment by JumpCrisscross
9 months ago
> Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet
That “true spirit of the internet” caused the ad-based cesspool we have today. Pretending for a free lunch doesn’t work. What you may be suggesting is school districts pay for Kagi, and in that I fully agree. But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work.
> But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work.
Free worked for much longer than it didn't work, and it will work again. There just needs to be a drastic adjustment in the amount of greed considered socially acceptable, and I can already see that pendulum swinging back.
It didn't work because it was free, it worked because you had to pay something more like dollars per page you published to host content than like pennies per thousands of pages.
For quite a long time, other than exceptions like geocities, you had to pay to publish your own content.
People who had an axe to grind or a hobby to share were "pamphleteering" and it was great.
"Free" only worked when there was little to no economic interest in the web.
So all we need to do is change our economic model, social norms, and human nature.
Easy peasy.
Those damned greedy servers needing electricity to run.