TS is a lot easier to set up than WG and does not require a publicly accessible IP address nor any public whatsoever. It’s not really comparable to setting WG up yourself; especially w.r.t. security.

It’s a central server (that you could actually self-host publicly if you wanted to) whose purpose it is to facilitate P2P connections between your devices.

If you were outside your home network and wanted to connect to your server from your laptop, both devices would be connected to the TS server independently. When attempting to send IP packets between the devices, the initiating device (i.e. your laptop) would establish a direct wireguard tunnel to the receiving device. This process is managed by the individual devices while the central TS service merely facilitates communication between the devices for the purpose of establishing this connection.

If you’re worried about that, I can recommend a service like Tailscale which does not require permanently open ports to the outside world, offering quite a bit more security than an exposed traditional VPN server.

Oh I’m sure your health insurance would love to know the condition of your teeth to increase your rates.

Whether this is bad depends on your threat model. Additionally, you must also consider that other search engines are able to easily identify you explicitly identifying yourself. If you can’t fool https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/, you certainly can’t fool Google for instance. And that’s even ignoring the immense identifying potential of user behaviour.

Billing supports OpenNode AFAICT which I guess you could funnel your Moneros through but meh.

I think you’re underestimating how huge of an undertaking a half-decent search index is, much less a good one.

I personally have not found Kagi’s default search results to be all that impressive

At their worst, they’re as bad as Google’s. For me however, this is a great improvement over using bing/Google proxies which would be the alternative.

maybe if I took the time to customize, I might feel differently.

That’s the killer feature IMHO.

Your search results look very different to mine:

Did you disable Grouped Results?

All the LLM-generated “top 10” listicles are grouped into one large block I can safely ignore. (I could hide them entirely but the visual grouping allows for easy mental filtering, so I haven’t bothered.) Your weird top10 fake site does not show up.

But yes, as the linked article says, Kagi is primarily a proxy for Google with some extra on top. This is, unfortunately, a feature as Google’s index still reigns supreme for general purpose search. It absolutely is bad and getting worse but sadly still the best you can get. Using only non-Google indices would just result in bad search results.
The Google-ness is somewhat mitigated by Kagi-exclusive features such as the LLM garbage grouping.

What Google also cannot do is highlighted in my screenshot: You can customise filtering and ranking.
The first search result is a Reddit thread with some decent discussion because I configured Kagi to prefer Reddit search results. In the case of household appliances, this doesn’t do a whole lot as I have not researched trusted/untrusted sources in this field yet but it’s very noticeable in fields like programming where I have manually ranked sites.

Kagi is not “all about” privacy. It’s a factor, sure but ultimately you still have to trust a U.S. company. Better than “trusting” a known abuser (Google, M$) but without an external audit, I wouldn’t put too much wight into this.
The index ain’t it either as it’s mostly Google though sometimes a bit better.
What really sets it apart is the features. Customised ranking aswell as blocking some sites outright (bye bye pinterest and userbenchmark) are immensely useful. So are filtering garbage results that Google still likes to return.

That whole situation was such an overblown idiotic mess. Kagi has always used indices from companies that do far more unethical things than committing the extreme crime of having a CEO who has stupid opinions on human rights.
I 100% agree with Vlad’s response to this whole thing and anyone who thinks otherwise should question what exactly it is they’re criticising.

I don’t like Brave (super shady IMHO) and certainly not their CEO but I didn’t sign up for a 100% ethically correct search engine, I signed up for a search engine with innovative features and good search results. The only viable alternatives are to use 100% not ethically correct search indices with meh (Google) to bad (Bing, DDG) search results. If you’re going to tell me how Google and M$ are somehow ethical, I’m going to have to laugh at you.

The whole argument amounts to whining about the status quo and bashing the one company that tries anything to change it. The only way to get away from the Google monopoly is alternative indices. Yes those alternatives may not be much more ethical than friggin Google. So what.

I do like the idea of using USB drives for storage, though…

I wholeheartedly don’t.

They are quite solid but be aware that the web UI is dog slow and the menus weirdly designed.

Well that depends on how you define malware ;)

The problem is that it’s not just 15W; I merely used that as an example of how even just two “low power” devices can cause an effect that you can measure in euros rather than cents.

Yes. Low power draws add up. 5W here 10W there and you’re already looking at >3€ per month.

You probably could. Though I don’t see the point in powering a home server over PoE.

A random SBC in the closet? WAP? Sure. Not a home server though.

If you’re using containers for everything anyways, the distro you use doesn’t much matter.

If Ubuntu works for you and switching away would mean significant effort, I see no reason to switch outside of curiosity.

The operating system is explicitly not virtualised with containers.

What you’ve described is closer to paravirtualisation where it’s still a separate operating system in the guest but the hardware doesn’t pretend to be physical anymore and is explicitly a software interface.

Yes, it’s called email. Run

git send-email

as Linus intended.

Paperless for keeping track of text written on the dead trees which companies keep sending me instead of email.

Actualbudget for keeping track where the money goes.

A modem is a sort of “adapter” between physical mediums and protocols and sometimes also a router. It speaks DSL, fibre, cable etc. on one end and Ethernet on the other.

A wireless access point is similar in that is also is an “adapter” between mediums but it’s an adapter between physical and wireless. It effectively connects wireless devices to your physical Ethernet network (allowing communication in both directions) and never does any routing.

What you are typically provided by an ISP is an all-in one box that contains modem, router, switch, firewall, wireless access point, DHCP server, DNS resolver and more things in one device. For a home network, I wouldn’t want most of these to be separate devices either but at least wireless should be separate because the point of connection for the modem is likely not the location where you need the WiFi signal the most.