Kagi Social: A Feature Proposal

Dustin

There are a lot of legal hurdles that exist or are being proposed all around the world in regards to speech, content moderation, data ownership and age verification that might make this a legally and financially painful endeavour for a small group like Kagi.

The US, Canada, UK, Australia, India and Europe all have things on the books or in the works that should be considered if Kagi wishes to have a speech platform.

sarno

I'm really not fond of this idea tbqh.

For one, there is an absolutely insane number of social media platforms already (in no particular order);

Facebook
ExTwitter (do u c wut i did thar?)
Bluesky
Threads
Mastodon
LinkedIn
Arguably others such as Reddit, etc.

For another, I'm not sure their customers need two forums, a Discord server, and also your suggestion.

For a third... it's really not my place to tell Vlad & co how to run their company, but as an outsider looking in - to be blunt, I would say my #1 concern for this company is (by a country mile) scope screep.

It wasn't all that long ago that Vlad was telling people that rolling out their own infrastructure for Sync would be prohibitively expensive - and now suddenly a social media platform is being considered?

That's on top of a search engine, a very ambitious web browser targeting iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and now Linux - with talk of Windows at some point in the future - and I seem to remember on the old Discord server for Kagi Search that Vlad had been wanting to release an email service?

I don't expect a social media platform to be profitable - least of all for a company that's heavily opposed to advertisements - and as someone who has paid for a Lifetime subscription to Orion+ on top of paying for Kagi Search on a monthly basis, I think I would find myself resenting the distraction that such would pose from the services they have already released - and started charging for.

I'm not delusional; I don't believe that financially supporting the company is akin to buying equity in the company and 'having a say' in that respect. All I can do is offer an honest and robust assessment from someone who's not a part of the company - and there's been more than one friend I've tried getting interested in Kagi that found themselves repelled by the team's seeming lack of focus and discipline.

RoxyRoxyRoxy

I could see something extremely minimal like HackerNews or a very simple forum. I don’t need nor want another X clone, there’s too damn many frankly and it’s not a format I think aligns well with Kagi. Even that shouldn’t be considered until far far down the road, at least 100k users if not more.

Vlad

rmrf0710 Thanks for putting this together. Fun to see how is the community thinking about next steps for Kagi.

I have considered this before several times and it does seem fairly trivial for every kagi member to get an opt-in public profile. To avoid content moderation I imagined it would be a place to only share links (as discovering content is what I use social media for anyway). In this way you'd be easilly be able to find a few people with shard interests to follow their link stream.

The added benefit of this is that the links you share and from people you follow would then surface in your Kagi search results.

An early version of this is already sort of avaialble on https://tinygem.org (although this is organised more as 'read later' service than a social network) where you can see my public link stream for example https://tinygem.org/tomcat/

Desoroxxx

What you highlight in the "The Problem" section feels like it is solved by Bluesky (and other open source social platforms); it is not maximizing time spent, nor does it collect much data or not at all (I’m not sure about that would need to double check), and it does cater for meaningful human connections (see recent features added like follower-only replies etc...).

I get why this might come to your mind, but socials are a whole different can of worms which I believe should maybe be left alone by Kagi. It is not very profitable or at all, and it costs exponentially more resources than most people realize (you don't want your posts to be deleted after a while, do you?).

In addition, compared to Orion, Translate, or other services/projects of Kagi, I don't feel like it feeds back into the "main" product of Kagi.

afpco

Instead of getting involved in general social media, you can add a system like this to your search—one that allows you to add comments to links, vote, and so on.

ak42

I think we all need some kind of social networks detox session and start using RSS. 😃
ok, ok, I'm not following my actual friends as they all are crawling on the sidewalk with a Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/[other dealer name goes here] needle between their toes.
Anyway, my friends and family (and probably yours too) will probably never use "content dealers" who do not make heavy use of engagement algorithms.

Mackou

I would never use that

bkrein

My two cents on this is that I'd like Kagi to focus on search and related areas, a social network doesn't fit. I've been using Fastmail for almost a decade because they do only that only; Mail (and co). I'd be too afraid that Kagi would stretch itself too thin with other side quests that are not core mission.

Boomkop3

I think this would be a waste of time. How about focussing on improving search so people frustrated with current social media will have an even easier time finding places like lemmy or mastodon.

ak42

Boomkop3
Can't agree more.
There are some improvements that could be made to search that would improve drastically search results.
like allowing people to use something else than English to have the weather widget appear. so annoying ! and so easy to fix.

Or having better Lenses results (Lenses are a great idea, but it's just not working). For now Lenses results are so bad that I just stick to regular search which generally brings me the result I'm looking for in the 2-3 first search results. But I'm pretty sure Lenses could still bring an added value.

Or improving privacy pass to allow at least CSS customization done locally.
Or improving privacy pass to allow filtering and reordering (Personalized Results) done locally.

Or improving github results. I'd love to be able to see stars/forks/last commit date and all these stats on github, a bit like with imdb results

alexanderhblack

First of all, great work on this proposal it's clearly well thought out and I love the mockups. If this were to be implemented, your proposal is exactly how I'd envision it.

However, I'd immediately disable it on my end. I deleted all my social media a couple years ago and won't pick up a new one. If there's enough interest for this feature I totally support it as long as it's opt-in/opt-out but personally, I'd immediately disable it.

Maybe just make a subreddit for something like that for the Kagi users who want to connect further?

RoxyRoxyRoxy

alexanderhblack There is r/SearchKagi but it’s not super active.

Dustin

RoxyRoxyRoxy I might as well plug the unofficial Matrix room while we're on the topic: https://matrix.to/#/#kagi:matrix.org

If people are using Matrix and want a place to chat about Kagi outside of Discord, all are welcome.

sarno

While we're plugging social media, Kagi's on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/kagi.com

^so ^am ^I ^:)

Thibaultmol

well, if you want to plug something that's actually open: https://mastodon.social/@kagihq
Bluesky isn't really an open as they claim it is (it still requires their central server. meanwhile Mastodon/etc are actually federated).

About this suggestion (my personal opinion, not my staff opinion): I'm not really what the benefit would be of this over all the various fediverse software like Mastodon/misskey/etc. They've already reinvented the wheel, plus there are so many choices already, what exactly would Kagi bring to the table that those haven't already done.

Now Kagi hosting a Mastodon instance or some other fedi platform. that could be an interesting idea, although obv it gets complicated about: what happens if you stop paying or your credit card gets declined or something. You lose access to your main social account.. not great either.

But yeah, this feels like reinventing the wheel when 50 other people are already reinventing their own wheels.
And in the end it only makes sense to make something that's compatible via activitypub so it can federate with all these others platforms. and they already do that. so yeah.

sarno

Thibaultmol well, if you want to plug something that's actually open: https://mastodon.social/@kagihq
Bluesky isn't really an open as they claim it is (it still requires their central server. meanwhile Mastodon/etc are actually federated).

I'm not optimistic for the future of Mastodon et al. Bluesky is an app that is easy to promote, easy for users to find and install and register accounts on; the barrier to entry isn't appreciably higher than ExTwitter's. I'm not really sure the average not-particularly-tech-savvy person is going to put up with Mastodon's onboarding process, let alone use it over the long-term. It feels like a social media with a very real cap on the number of potential users.

Temanor

Thibaultmol As sarno already said, I think the usability of Bluesky is a major factor.
Most people won't really care that it isn't completely open as long as it is easy to use, and has a good userbase. I think this is partly why Mastodon doesn't have as many users.
I do however wish that Bluesky would open up even more.

Luckily for us, Kagi has accounts on multiple social media platforms, so none of us are left out 🙂

Marcin

I appreciate that you wrote up this proposal and I think it's a cool idea. I do share others' concerns that this may not be right for Kagi. (This is my personal opinion and not that of Kagi.)

Temanor

I think it is a cool idea, but I personally don't really see a need for this.