I was using DuckDuckGo and it was giving me pretty ‘eh’ results, only marginally better than google on the surface level, but both weren’t really usable for deep older searches. (and ddg starting to add sus ads/promoted) Brave is better, but Kagi has been fantastic when I’ve really needed to find something specific, technical, or very old. I think the best way to come about the pricing structure and limited search results is that I think it’s not supposed to be your only search engine from then on. There are times when you need what kagi gives in terms of producing quality and relevant results, and times you just wanna search “[company name] reviews/is a scam?” that using kagi wouldn’t serve you better than anything else, so it’s more of a tool that you bring out when you aren’t finding what you need with free search engines. On it’s own page it doesn’t try and oversell you on it, they admit that the majority of people don’t need paid search most of the time.
I haven’t approached if it’s an early netflix thing where you could split the bill with others for one login/family plan, that might make it more feasible.
Reddit/Lemmy are link aggregators with a forum-like comment and post structure. Mastodon/Twitter are microblogging platforms. You go to someone’s blog to read their thoughts, in the context of themselves, and everyone choosing to follow would like to keep up to date with their going ons/niche interests. You go to a forum to read discussions, on a specific topic, in a (somewhat) more organized fashion, and will recognize the regulars in regards to their discussion contribution.
On Mastodon/Twitter, you follow people. On Reddit/Lemmy, you follow topics. You can follow hashtags on mastodon, and you can follow people on reddit, but in general, the philosophy of what you would do with these platforms is different. These both can work together on the fediverse, and in general, social media, because a post on either isn’t much more than text and images with some categorical tags/filters. The technical specifications aren’t that much different, so they can be applied in the same space.
However, I feel like lemmy and mastodon aren’t going to see as much interaction with each other for this reason. It’s possible, people have already been demonstrating it, but I’ve tried browsing a community from mastodon and it’s just not inductive to how that UI/strategy displays long form comment chains. I mean mastodon itself doesn’t even create a visual indicator of comment chains. This isn’t exactly a terrible downside, I do like mastodon and used twitter a lot, but I go to lemmy and mastodon for different reasons, as they were created for different purposes!