Sorry, I’m just exasperated with the “well ackshually” bros. There’s nothing wrong with having a .world account, but that’s where a lot of the worst redditbros migrated to, so whenever someone shows up with a bad take it’s usually someone with an account on that instance.

The instance also has moderators and admins who tolerate queerphobia, racism, and other forms of bigotry, which is unfortunate. A lot of people have left the instance for that reason. I personally refuse to interact with any community on .world because of what I’ve seen.

Maybe someone with a .world account showed up to “well ackshually” the inhabitants, and they all left. Who can blame them.

I think I need to take another break from this bullshit

(lemmy dot world account, what a shocker)

I’d wager that a good percentage of people who support displays like this are also violently antisemitic, and they only support Israel specifically because it’s a genocidal apartheid state.

When I go to block zionist blogs on tumblr, they’re almost always reblogging posts by Terfs and white nationalists.

Like congratulations I guess, Israel’s got the support of Nazis.

You know what’s hilarious about this basically non-functional setting? If I toggle the switch off, it provides results based on my IP address’s location, but if I toggle it to “UK” it will also provide some results for the UK city that my town is named after, without me ever providing the name of my town lol

DDG is a for-profit brand that’s a lot more nefarious than people think. They’ve even succumbed to AI.

Even the lite and html versions of DDG will provide locationally biased search results. There’s no way around this. Best you can do is use a VPN, but then you’ve still got the problem of reading locationally biased results, just for a different location. It sucks.

Oh believe me, I know. DDG was the first one I tried, and I tested it with every configuration possible. Like many other search engines such as startpage and kagi, you sure can do this in the settings, but it will do absolutely nothing to stop it from using your IP address to net locationally biased results specific to your current location. You may assume it would function like this, but it doesn’t.

I even tried their html and lite versions, but although it was less cluttered and much more pleasant to use, it still provided results that were very clearly based on my IP address.

I’m not even sure what those settings do because they appear to have no function. Maybe they change language and currency on some sites for convenience, but again, that’s not what I’m talking about in my comment! I’m saying a search engine should not use any locational data whatsoever to adjust results. And if you reply “well, good luck finding one because it doesn’t exist,” then congratulations, you understand my comment! They don’t exist because we’ve all sacrificed our societal wellbeing for the sake of the smallest convenience.

Even if changing it to another country/region worked (it doesn’t), we’d still have the problem of netting biased results based on what country I switch it to. That would be akin to searching while using my VPN, which once again, does not solve the problem of search engines using IP address to provide locationally biased results.

On Android, there’s also NewPipe or Tubular

Anything with cats is inherently superior

Search engines should not use locational data including IP address to provide “more relevant” results. Checking for restaurants or weather forecast? You should have to manually add the relevant search terms. Want results in a specific language? You should have to manually apply this filter.

Convenience is not worth the potential harm of locationally biased search results.

For example, where I live is like White Nationalist Central Station. My search results are thus far more likely to net me results with a pro-US/nationalist skew, thus potentially entrenching or normalizing harmful beliefs.

Whenever I’ve tried bringing this up with Techlords, I get a feeble, “B-but then you couldn’t say ‘restaurants near me’ UnU” and like … good? It’s not like it’s hard to type city and state in the search field.

I’ve never found a search engine that even has this as an option. Even Sear XNG instances net results that are clearly aligned with the location of the instances server.

A Kagi dev even lied to me when I was looking into that as an alternative, saying they don’t use location, when it’s pretty easy to determine that they do.

I also don’t want a “good” algorithm. I also don’t want to see big corporate sites prioritized either. If some backwoods nobody has a site that’s more relevant, show it to me. I feel like pre-Google search engines were better, but that’s another vent for another day.

Now where did I put my false teeth and walker???

Thanks for losing the easiest US election in history because you couldn’t stop murdering and deporting brown kids

Gods, I wish she’d shut the fuck up

Blue Velvet vibes

Me listening to “Business Man” by Tom Cardy for the 35th time in a row

I led with understanding, and I’m the one who mentioned teenagers in the comment I wrote with my own two hands

I understand wanting to do this as a parent, but I’m so thankful I grew up without cell phones. I would never track a teenager. I feel like teenagers need space to assert their own autonomy and form an identity apart from their parents. When I think of the best moments I had with friends, it’s almost always something that would have technically gone against my parents’ knowledge and wishes, even though my parents were very good to me overall.

A horror story in 3 words: My phone rang

I have chronic depression and OCD, but even on a cloudy day some rays of sun may shine