vaguerant

SearXNG is pretty lightweight to run, it’s mostly run by the same kind of people who host Mastodon and other fediverse instances, often off the same servers. maapl.net is run by Mike Fraser, @mike@thecanadian.social from the image in OP, where thecanadian.social is his donation-supported, Canadian-focussed Mastodon instance. I don’t know whether the funding for maapl.net comes out of that same donation pool, but it would make sense.

It’s worth knowing that SearXNG (Wikipedia) is an open-source metasearch engine that has many available hosts. At the bottom of maapl.net is a link to a list of public instances. maapl.net isn’t actually on the list yet, but there’s one other Canadian host, https://searxng.shreven.org/. For any non-Canadians who catch this, there’s a bunch of other instances you might want to try, e.g. in Europe.

I use Matrix daily but I would hesitate to recommend giving it to children unless you’re able to set it up in such a way that they only have access to the rooms you configure–I don’t think any Matrix apps have parental control settings but I’ve never checked.

Matrix has kind of miserable moderation options. Mods can’t do basic things like disabling attachments, which makes it prone to NSFL/NSFW image spam. The official automod bot, Mjolnir, can mitigate this somewhat, but can be pretty easily gamed. e.g. It tries to prevent image spam by deleting messages that have an image if they’re the first message a user sends in the channel–so spammers just send a message to highlight everybody first, then the images.

When there’s nothing that needs moderating, Matrix is great. However, it is severely lacking in ways to handle abuse. If you’re in a community that’s being targeted by bad actors (like Jared Leto), you basically just have to deal with it; there’s very little you can do proactively.

In this case, the goose didn’t even need numbers. The eagle eventually gave up the fight and flew away. Something something, don’t start a fight you can’t finish.