Mwmbl is a community-built, non-profit search engine that puts privacy and user control first. It offers a truly different search experience—one where the results are shaped not by corporate interests but by real people.
Key Features:
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Ad-Free & Privacy-Respecting: No ads, no tracking, and no commercial interests—just a search engine built with the users in mind.
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User-Curated Results: Instead of relying on algorithms, search results are refined and tuned by the community.
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Community-Driven Crawling: The engine relies on volunteer-run crawlers. Although the index currently holds around 500 million unique URLs, there's massive potential.
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Ambitious Growth Goals: mwmbl plans to reach 10 billion unique URLs by the end of 2025 and 100 billion by 2026, at which point it should be a true alternative to commercial search engines.
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Open-Source: The project is fully open-source, meaning you can contribute to the code and help resolve issues to push the project forward.
How to Get Involved:
Right now, the search quality is pretty rough, but that’s where you can make an impact:
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Contribute to the Index:
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Install the Firefox Extension: Once installed, it crawls the web on your behalf.
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Run the CLI Script: An even better option would be to use your spare computing power by running the command line crawler.
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Join the Community: The main community is on Matrix for non-development related discussions.
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Code Contributions: Check out the project on Codeberg. You can contribute code, report issues, or suggest new features to help make the search results better.
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Financial Contributions: Donate some money towards hosting costs and supporting volunteers.
Group messaging: Revolt is a great alternative to Discord with almost complete feature-parity. It is centralized, though federation might be implemented in the future. The only tradeoff is the lack of communities compared to Discord.
Search engine: Check out mwmbl. Still would be catagorized under "major tradeoffs", but it seems promising.
3D modelling: This one should be put under "no brainer". Blender is one of the best software for 3D modelling. Houdini (proprietary option) is more powerful, but comes at a massive increase in the learning curve that's only worth it if you work at Pixar or something like that.