Not a technical person, as I understand it, Google and Bing are full search engines while options like Seaexng, Ecosia, Duckduckgo are meta search engine that depend on Google or Bing. Are there other search engines that are fully independent, and if there aren't, what are the barriers that stop other search engines from emerging

I noticed Bonfire is getting a lot of positive attention lately, and I wanted to try it out. They don't have a directory of instances yet. Do you have any instances that you recommend.

Is there way to mirror reddit to piefed/lemmy, youtube videos on peertube, tumblr on wafrn, or IG posts on pixelfed etc

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38742245

“solar mamas” trained in Zanzibar by Barefoot College International, a global nonprofit, through a program that brings light to rural communities and provides jobs for local women. So far in Zanzibar, it has lit 1,845 homes [in 10 years].

The program selects middle-aged women, most with little or no formal education, from villages without electricity and trains them over six months to become solar power technicians.

Barefoot College International focuses on middle-aged women because they tend to have the strongest links to their communities while not often involved in intensive child care.

India’s solar additions surged 70% year on year to 29.5 GW in the first three quarters of 2025, driven by rapid utility-scale and rooftop deployment, according to JMK Research.

Summary

-Ethiopia wins backing of African nations, seeing off Nigeria

-Host role gives Ethiopia influence over outcomes and agenda

-COP31 remains a contest between Turkey and Australia with Pacific Islands

The press release from Nextcloud:

European software company Nextcloud presents its investment program „Sovereignty 2030“ to make the high-performance, sovereign open-source platform more widely available for organizations. The European company plans to invest more than 250 million Euros in digital sovereignty until 2030. The digital collaboration platform provider will invest in research and development, product innovations and partner enablement, public education and community projects to drive digital sovereignty in Europe.

„Europe can’t wait. As political decision making takes time, it is the local private sector that has to push our economic independence in a bottom-up approach. This is why we decided to take the lead. While infrastructure is important, we believe that the investment in brain power, people and education will be the decisive factor when it comes to sovereignty and digital independence,“ said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder, Nextcloud.

The investment program „Sovereignty 2030“ comprises the following focus areas:

People and brain power: Over the next five years, Nextcloud aims to expand its global workforce 7-fold to expand its product and set a new standard in collaboration technology. The firm will introduce key security and compliance innovations, invest in further AI research programs, expand scalability and performance of the product as well as developing new features that will further improve the productivity of teams collaborating in digital workplace environments.

Sovereign ecosystem: Nextcloud seeks to expand its global partner ecosystem and strengthen existing partnerships in order to create an industry-wide movement that allows individuals, private companies, and the public sector an easy setup and effortless, secure access to sovereign IT solutions. In October, Nextcloud already announced to be a founding member of the EuroStack Foundation with the goal to move from talking about digital sovereignty to taking action.

Educate and inform: Nextcloud will further expand its collaboration with partners and civil society organizations to educate and inform the public about privacy, security and digital sovereignty. Moreover, it will augment its leading role in the open source community, advocating and educating about the benefits of transparency, open standards and open code.

Empower the community: Nextcloud aims to grow and support the wider open source community, providing resources from coaching, training, and documentation to travel support, bringing together contributors from around the world to create and innovate on concepts of digital sovereignty, decentralization, and federation.

With Nextcloud, users can edit and share documents, chat and hold video conferences, and manage emails, contacts and calendars via easy web and mobile apps. Thousands of government agencies, companies, universities, research institutions and schools across Europe and beyond use Nextcloud, adding to the millions of individual users globally.

„Since the beginning of the year, interest in Nextcloud has tripled. Potential customers are also stating very clearly that they see dependency on big tech as a risk,“ said Frank Karlitschek. „We demonstrate that sovereign alternatives to big tech are not only possible, but already available.“

Founded in 2016, the open source company has developed its software from an enterprise file sync and share solution to a comprehensive collaboration platform, including chat, videoconferencing, office, groupware (mail, calendar, contacts), process automation engine and an AI Assistant. The open-source software has a modular design and can be extended with hundreds of apps. Nextcloud software runs on premises in a private cloud or with a trusted provider.

„We have constantly expanded our team and increased our spending in research and development to tens of millions per year,” said Frank Karlitschek.

Nextcloud aims to achieve this growth without venture capital or other external funding. Historically the company has grown its bookings 50-70% percent year over year. The company is profitable and headquartered in Germany.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/54530035

How do you find content on fedi? Do you use any algorithm tools you recommend?

Rn, I check https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows (a mastodon acct that recommends interesting accounts to follow), and https://followgraph.vercel.app/ , an algorithm that shows you people your following follow on Mastodon.

Aside from that I stumbled upon things which is always fun but I wish there is an easier way to find interesting things without always manually searching and digging through results.

Bridges like Bridgy-Fed and others can connect Fediverse to interact with Bluesky from their Fediverse account. Bridges are an opt-in which I think its a great thing for privacy. But at the same time, I don't think the majority of Fediverse users who would be interested in using bridges know that they exist.

What I am suggesting is that large Fediverse instances (and Bluesky) encourage and make it easy to use brigdes by having an easy tool to turn on or turn off bridges.

An example situation could be when someone creates an account on mastadon.social, a small pop up shows ups explaining what bridges are in two-three sentences, and has a recommended bridge to use along with a drop down of other options to choose from, and ask it they would like to bridge or not like to bridge.

The videos for FediCon 2025 are going to uploaded to the following PeerTube account:

@fedicon

https://spectra.video/@fedicon

I know the app has a "hottest" section but its doesn't update regularly and seems a bit random. Am I using it wrong? Do you have other methods you use?