There’s also YaCy, which is a peer-to-peer search engine. You index whatever you want, and when you search, you connect to lots of other indices as well as your own.

I want to set up my own node at some point. My understanding is that the search results are hit and miss, but you have the power to improve things by building your own index of pages you want to search regularly. And this benefits everyone else too.

Since search indexing is so intensive, I think it’s the right technical solution if you want a truly open and independent alternative.

The idealistic approach would be: all content freely available, and ask readers to donate if they value it, to fund continual production of more work. E.g. Democracy for Sale. Even better if it’s under a free content license.

The practical approach would be: make some content freely available, and put the rest behind a paywall. But the content should still be available in open formats like RSS, via a private feed. E.g. LWN, Stratechery.

There were many crazy things, but the one that affected me the most was my RE teacher’s insistence that all non-Catholics would go to hell. My best friend’s dad, who was an atheist and a very kind person, had died a few days before and it made me really upset. My parents complained to the school about it.