FOSSDLE PieFedLemmy wouldn't really takeoff to replace Reddit until it's content is search indexable
submitted by
Avieshek
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19004972
Let’s be honest, the real reason Lemmy build most of its traffic is because of Reddit users. But the thing is, outside of the mass exodus in the west that too from the PC era.. people discover and join Reddit not because it’s another social media like Facebook or Twitter that people need to reserve their usernames on like a brand or celebrity but because Google Search is kinda… actually absolute trash by SEO and machine learning crawlers.
Most of the world (I am from India btw, hello~) join or even discover reddit because they’re trying to search for actual solutions, recommendations, advice or even reviews by actual experienced people without having to go through another YouTuber which can stem from troubleshooting a router, finding an actual FOSS option or seeking immediate solutions to the recent CrowdStrike fiasco for example. After having to visit reddit every time whenever using a search engine including for education to career advice, I ended up directly signing up with reddit a decade ago.
Recently, Reddit even restricted its search results to Google only in a business partnership meaning those using Bing, DuckDuckGo to Ecosia or even SearchGPT wouldn’t be able to access Reddit answers anymore. Say, if someone searches for how to block ads on chrome as example - Solutions like uBlock Origin come into existence and continue to exist because of the combined community in Reddit that Lemmy is trying to preserve.
Unlike others, am not saying Lemmy would be dead but it would be pretty much like Discord-Telegram or Tumblr instead of wiping Reddit or correcting Facebook. Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure unlike other social media which is even truer for Lemmy but because it actually helps and is useful to people.
Lemmy can’t be taking the path of 𝕏 (Alone Mask’s Twitter) but any of the good platforms were before the Enshittification with Facebook’s way~
but Lemmy already does show up on Google results
https://www.google.com/search?q=Lemmy+wouldn%27t+really+takeoff+to+replace+Reddit+until+it%27s+content+is+search+indexable
Tried searching this on ddg, not there yet probably because it's not indexed and cached yet
I clicked that link and the first dozen results were Reddit posts and garbage
something on your end? my top result is from lemmy.world
maybe try opening the link in Private Mode or Incognito
For me it's 4 Lemmy results and then 2 reddit results and after than chaos ensues.
Top two are Lemmy instances.
Top one is Voyager for me but right below that is Lemmy world
Isn’t Lemmy content being openly indexed by most search engines? I think we just don’t have the years of content here, so it’s not going to have the same gravity.
Also, I wonder about all the varied domain names of all the servers. Would search engines treat them all as separate sites, and calculate page rank for each separately? If that’s the case, the influence of Lemmy in search results would be even lower.
It is and search engines do treat them separately, which is problematic, as seeing the same content on multiple domains may be seen as spammy and lead to downranking.
https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search tried to fix this, but was put on hold due to some perf issues with a lemmy update.
Kagi recently added a fediverse filter, though I barely use it because there are rarely good results. Just isn't much content worth searching on lemmy yet
I don't think this is true, Lemmy is already using
rel="canonical"which should be telling Google what the real URL is, like here on programming.dev I see this in the page source[HTML_REMOVED]which is why the Google results for this search don't show a million different instances mirroring it
https://www.google.com/search?q=Lemmy+wouldn't+really+takeoff+to+replace+Reddit+until+it's+content+is+search+indexable
https://www.semrush.com/blog/canonical-url-guide/
Here was the discussion about it where it was fixed last year https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1418
That's good, I didn't know about that. Although the problem does still seem to exist with
different software
and different frontends
I mostly agree with the OP, it would be great if Lemmy had more sources of newbies than just "pissed off redditors". (I have further reasons for that, but they don't matter here.) As such *I'll focus on specific tidbits here and there.*
The content is indexable (by Google), but your point stands as it sucks. It's hard to reliably find Lemmy content by it.
Do you - or anyone here - have a good idea on how to solve that? Someone suggested a Lemmy-based engine; it's tempting but it wouldn't help if the person doesn't know about Lemmy already.
It used to be like this. "Stumbling" upon the site was only a thing later, as it had already enough content to become a source of info.
type
site:lemmy.worldin front of your search if using google. You can combine multiple instances with the OR operator iesite:lemmy.world OR site:programming.devthis will force google to give you content only from your desired domains but lemmy.world posts will likely trample the other instances for a lot of stuff.We're becoming a little centralized (which I personally don't find to be such a bad thing yet).
I'm aware of the
site:example.comgoogle feature. And, while useful for users who *already know about Lemmy*, it doesn't help to recruit new users, and that's a main point of the OP.About centralisation: that "yet" is key. Putting all your eggs in the same basket is not a bad thing... until someone drops the basket, you know?
You can use wildcards:
site:lemmy.*On Kagi there’s a fediverse lens (basically a filter)
How did I not know this?? Thanks!
Listen, it's not our job to make Google search result better. They could have easily parsed apub sites like lemmy correctly of they want, but they're so enshittified there's low chance of that. But that doesn't mean we should be trying to fix their shit.
Is there even a good alternative to Google? DuckDuckGo does not count to me as it is close source
Searxng
Unless we want more users.
As many others have already said, Lemmy is fully indexable by search engines. In fact, in this very community there have been posts about Lemmy content being *above* other results from more prominent sites like Reddit for certain topics.
Lemmy will be indexed less than Reddit, ignoring user counts, because lemmy-ui is client rendered. Googlebot and some others can still index client rendered sites, but others will ignore the content.
God I wish someone went and finally fixed that. It's incredible that of all the FOSS and community stuff you can find on the internet, lemmy is the big one that can't even remotely be browsed via w3m / elinks / anything-without-Javascript.
Lemmy won't catch on until there are groups of communities you can ban at once. Sports, Linux, German, pervy anime... It's a very rare user who will put up with the absolute dreck of the initial feed and manually block communities until they have a feed that's marginally personalized.
Then there's the fact that any communities that are specific to peoples interests are completely empty.
Those should be locked, and redirect to more generic active communities for the time being.
Any example in mind?
Sailing. Boating. Sewing. Those are they tops ones I miss from reddit that had active users. Instead we have 7000 communities for linux and pervy anime.
I mean it predates a lot of the pervy anime, but Usenet looked the same at the start with lots of Unix/computer boards and an alt.
Computer enthusiasts gonna enthusiastically talk about computers. People who pick up and move to a new platform are likely to be united around being technically competent enough to get there first, and everything else second.
Very true. But that's what we can create whole instances for: to be the site you think will attract the users you want. With curated feeds, less pervy content, whatever.
There's nothing stopping anyone from starting a whole new world they want to see in the fediverse. Lemmy and other fedi apps are built like this for that very purpose.
Yes, but I'm talking about mass adoption. Very few users care, they want to scroll through and see stuff they like. They don't want to curate and host and delve into the intricacies. Until such time as someone makes lemmy palatable, the masses won't eat it.
That level of feed curation will appeal more to the masses, yeah. Just no one has started an instance like that yet. Although you seem like the perfect person, based on your analysis and responses. 😉
Bluesky is closer to what you're describing. The platform is more centralized and the feeds are more curated for the masses.
The "instances hosting communities" structure alleviates albeit not solves this problem; communities about related topics end in the same instances, that you can block.
It's a bad idea to compare Lemmy to Reddit or expect Lemmy to replace Reddit.
Slow growth is not a problem, it's actually a benefit.
There is no hurry, and no need to push for high user counts.
Rather than trying to attract more people, focus on making your communities an attractive place to be.
I didn't discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.
Mbin kinda does it but a lot more work for it to be a proper offering. It works great for Lemmy tho
I like some concepts and design of Mbin, something to learn from, but I'd believe more in its growth potential if not written mainly in php.
I think the main problem with searching for fediverse posts is not that they're not indexed but the lack of a singular tag to append when you want to search for them. To search for reddit posts it was easy because you could put in your keywords and stick 'reddit' or 'site:reddit.com' onto the end, but now there's too many domains to keep track of and you can't rely on appending 'lemmy' pointing a search engine towards all Lemmy instances, let alone kbin/mbin instances.
Exactly and for the same reason Lemmy won't become as big as it has the potential to become. "Join Lemmy!" "How?" "Go to one of hundreds of websites and join and you'll have access to the Lemmy content the admin decided you could have access to... Oh and people logging in from those other sites might not have access to the content on your site so you might not be able to interact with a big chunk of users unless it's on a website that is connected to both your site and the site your site isn't connected to so choose the site you create your account on wisely! Makes sense?"
Also, even if you find results through searching, it sucks that it probably brings you to an instance that isn't yours so you have to figure out a way to open the link from your own instance in order to post in the discussion... That is, if you actually can from the instance you're signing in from!
Lemmy Universal Link Switcher
This is a pretty much a solved problem, the solution just needs to be promoted more, perhaps even on the join-lemmy page.
I shouldn't need a third party to solve that AND it doesn't solve the issue that indexing is done by instance meaning that we can't search by adding "Lemmy" to our search like we do with Reddit...
You are assuming the point of this is to be famous rather than non profit niche community driven
Even if it's indexed, there's no single website to search for so even if I add "Lemmy" to help, it won't look for content where Lemmy isn't mentioned.
The mistake that was made was making the decentralization something that affects the front end. If the backend was decentralized and the front end was a single default website with people being able to create alternatives (but everyone being guaranteed access to all the content), that wouldn't be an issue. We could tell new users "Sign up on Lemmy.com and if you decide you don't like the UI just choose an alternative and use the same credentials to sign in." No one would know you're using a different UI, all content would be searchable by adding site:lemmy.com to your query.
A centralized frontend and a decentralized backend seems great in theory, but I'm not quite sure that's even possible without some one or some group owning the centralized frontend. And if one single entity controls the frontend, it defeats the purpose of decentralization. We want to avoid any one person or group owning the flow of our communication.
That's why you make the backend available to all to develop a front end, but there's a default option just called Lemmy that helps solve the indexing and getting people started issue. If the Lemmy default option becomes shit the data is still available and something else becomes the default option.
A bit like Jerboa is the official app, but everyone can develop an alternative... Get rid of the instances and make all content available no matter where you sign up from and let the users curate their feed, you get rid of the admins completely, only moderators continue to exist.
I agree it gets complex for users. But pushing back a bit, wouldn’t we instead say:
I have in mind that the top blocked instances are pedo oriented. Also seems like it would create a liability issue for servers mirroring that content.
Although it’s not a perfect solution to choose a default instance for new users, I do think it’s a powerful question to eliminate.
Hosts could choose to host NSFW content or not, right now they have the exact same issue anyway so the current situation is no better...
I'd rather Lemmy burn to the ground than become famous, seriously watching AND experiencing twitter, reddit, Facebook, MySpace, my-yearbook, and (does Skype count?). I would like to make Lemmy my forever social media. Only time will tell if it lasts though.
Yeah. Last thing I want is to deal with all the anti-environment, anti-EV pro-extremist right wing toxic-macho shit bots.
Quality, not quantity. With too many people, moderation begins to fail
I really don't want it to become worthwhile for the Russian troll farms that want every discussion to turn into a shitfest.
Why rely on google which is going down on reliability so quickly.
What we need is a GOOD lemmy based search engine. Which I think is entirely possible with current lemmy implementation.
The point is we hook into existing search engines that are widely used.
The post is saying it's difficult to discover lemmy without someone telling you about it. It's not really about searching lemmy.
Thank you.
Yeah, I think that's definitely one of the roadblocks Lemmy is facing at the moment. Even though I deleted my Reddit account after the API nonsense, I'm absolutely still appending every DDG or Startpage search with "reddit." Especially with the flood of AI-generated garbage filling search results, it's the easiest way to get quick answers from (probably) real people.
However, that also relates to Reddit's other advantage, in that it actually has a decade and a half of content to be indexed in the first place. The magic of Reddit is that every question has been asked in every way at least 5 times over, Lemmy just doesn't have that history yet.
good, keep it small and un-fucked with. the more eyes on it, the more in danger its in of either enshittification or being blocked by govs that don't want open conversation.
And how exactly do you plan to reach this high quality elite content without search engines?
"[search term] reddit" has been a top search since OpenAI decided to open the SEO bot floodgates.
And that's OK. The Internet was better before everyone was using it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September#/media/File:Internet_is_Full_-_Go_Away_t-shirt.jpg
Oh, that's a throwback. The internet and "nerd culture" used to be somewhat more exclusionary now that I reminisce a bit.
i don't want lwmmy to take off, i like it rn
Its niches are nowhere near as strong as reddit though. The only reason I can't ditch reddit is small hobby subs and stuff like that. Their alternatives on lemmy are just not good enough, because of a hideous combination of lack of users and fragmentation.
Yeah clerk.
What’s the point on commenting on something when you know you’re gonna be the only one doing it.
So I guess a few more people would be nice on Lemmy.
For me I want just a lil bit more of the niche subreddits to migrate over then I'll be content
Try searching Google for "Saganumenousness"
Elaborate?
You get all Lemmy results! Yaay!
Sorry, that's really all there's to it.
Got it. I mean one thing about Reddit isn't necessarily that it shows up in search results, but that people will go out of their way to append it to a search in order to get better results.
So whenever we google something we should all type Lemmy after it for SEO boosting
I don't think I'll ever take off while it's called Lemmy. It's just not a word that sounds 'good' in my opinion.
Even taking only English speakers into account, it isn't a bad name. It's a simple word, it sounds like "let me" (good association - unlike... GIMP), at most it might evoke you Lemmings.
And once considering other languages it's actually better than plenty brands out there, including Reddit, Facebook or Twitter. By sticking to CV syllables there's less room to butcher it into unrecognisability.
It’s not really about the name, people are just too lazy to switch app and they don’t care about the greedy Reddit’s CEO trying to make money in every possible way. Last thing I read about him was his idea to put some subreddits behind a paywall.
I was still using the Reddit app but with some tweaks installed on iOS to block ads, otherwise every app that it’s full of ads it’s just unusable.
Boost and Sync are available here as well
I tries to pus lemurs, but no one followed.
It does suck, that even within the apps or sites themselves, the search only gives communities.
Like, not being able to search for specific issues, people, or any other topic already posted even within your own instance is my biggest issue with Lemmy not being a sufficient replacement.
Like Reddit was the best place on the internet to go when was stuck with a Linux issue for instance. And rarely even having to post. Just searching the issue would generally get you fixed. Then we could start copying all the invaluable information over here from our communities efforts, and could then be truly free of Reddit once and for all!
The search page does allow all of this.
/search
You can filter by type (post, user, community, etc), Local/All/Subscribed, searching within a community, choosing a sort option or restricting to past year/month/week.... I think it's much better than Reddit's search.
To add on to that, Thunder have implemented all these search features in the app.
My bad, but good to know. The Jerboa app is almost all I use currently since I'm without a computer ATM. Do any of the apps do better with search?
I haven't used Jerboa in a while, but I know Boost supports almost all of the search features
Voyager is great.
OMG, Voyager is SO much better! Not sure why I hadn't tried it
I don't understand the Fedievrse objection to search indexing. Search indexing is the most important piece of what makes the internet.
There's no objection here https://www.google.com/search?q=Lemmy+wouldn’t+really+takeoff+to+replace+Reddit+until+it’s+content+is+search+indexable
An example fix from over a year ago https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1418
What I had in mind was the Mastodon meltdown some years ago over search indexing.
What? There is no "Fediverse objection" to indexing by search engines. Who told you that? Lemmy is actively being indexed and is showing up when you search for posts.
Interesting and well written (cross)post. If you hadn't said you're from India, I would have never guessed. The only spelling error I spotted is right at the end where you said Mask and not Musk.
All good though, we're (almost) all human around here. That's one of the big reasons that more experienced and educated people are switching towards the fediverse..
Fuck Spez
I don't know OP's specific background but english is taught in most of the subcontinent and is the primary language for business and formal matters, so I wouldn't expect any issues with it
Honestly I haven't studied foreign languages all that much, but I've heard the accents that come from a variety of regions and countries.
The last time I got confused about anything spoken in English by an Indian man, I mistook 'tiles' as 'towels'.
I totally lost out on a tile installation job offer over that, because of a misunderstanding over what's basically the pronunciation of a particular vowel.
Like, in the back of my head, I'm wondering why this hotel owner is telling me he's updating his towels, when really he said tiles. He was offering me a job..
I didn't find out until he got others to do all the work ☹️
Vowels can be extremely important in communication...
I’m from Connecticut and once had a serious problem with a person my company insured from North Carolina. He was talking to me about what caused his accident and I kept hearing “tar” instead of “tire.” We were equally qualified as native speakers.
If you’re concerned, you can listen to more Indian English, because familiarity should ease any understanding difficulties in the future.
I had already spent years doing occasional side work with around a dozen if not more folks originally from India. Most, except the oldest of the elders spoke good if not excellent English. But there's pretty much always gonna be at least a subtle accent, if not a heavy accent with secondary languages.
I thought I understood the fella clearly, but it was both a combination of his accent plus the strange sentence structure context that threw me totally off.
He said he was 'updating his tiles', but I misunderstood his vowels, so I heard 'updating his towels'
And why the hell would he use the word updating, he was literally having all the carpet removed in 44+ rooms and having tiles *installed*, not 'updated'.
So even the context clues didn't add up, I never guessed he was talking about the tile work he had been planning for months.
Sometimes it’s a second (or fifth) language for Indian people, but it’s also a dialect which is just as valid as your dialect and it’s got the second most English speakers in the world. The accent may just be an accent, you definitely shouldn’t assume that it’s a sign someone will have incorrect English. It sounds like you’re not in practice, but that’s definitely how I read your comments
Well exposure to different accents can make you understand these kind of things.
Pretty sure "Alone Mask" is intentional. It seems to be common to misspell his name on purpose. I've seen "Elmo Husk", "Leon Skum", etc.
Perhaps 🤷♂️
https://tinyurl.com/elonroll
In case you don't trust TinyURL, which I totally wouldn't blame you, that's a short link to a ~1MB low quality archived version of Elon Musk Eating Toilets...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=EAG0dC8l3SU
Twitter has been turned into a dumpster fire and people are still using it because of convenience, the same applies to Reddit.
I left Reddit not just because of the CEO but also because of the awful app they forced their users to use full of ads.
Spez (or one of their admin monkeys) perma-banned me from Reddit after like 7 years, for of all stupid things, posting actual facts about Elon Musk and his Boring Company's "Not A Flamethrower" contraption.
Wasn't any hate speech. Wasn't misinformation, I even posted reference links. Wasn't anything inappropriate or gory. Just straight up facts.
That was not all that long before Elon bought Xhitter.
Gotta love the irony huh? Fuck Spez and Musk.
It's a wordplay. I personally call him Melon Husk.
Maybe OP is fluent and I'll give the benefit of the doubt but I've also seen many developers specifically from India use Grammarly or ChatGPT to correct their writing. Idk, it's something to consider.
Indeed, and understandable. Modern AI does tend to do fairly well these days, but obviously no system is ever going to be perfect.
Not even our own ears are perfect. That's why humans have the sense to ask questions sometimes, like "Hold up, I didn't understand you, what did you just say?"
And if you check my other comments, you'll catch an interesting story of mine over the misunderstanding of a simple spoken vowel..
You mean other than "it's content" in the title?
Meh, true that. Hell, I dunno how to properly cross post on Lemmy, nor do I bother doing that anyways so whatever. 🤷♂️
There are MANY reasons that Lemmy won't replace Reddit.....the list is almost endless, with each individual reason not being a hurdle on its own that can't be solved. However the combined number of problems is just mind blowing.
There is one chief problem that sums up all the little problems quite nicely. It's the Fediverse culture. It's somehow a platform that is designed to be open and free, but because of the userbase comes off as a walled garden. If you're not a programmer, or a linux user, or have techie interests, it's not the platform for you. And in order to even be comparible to reddit, it has to be a platform for everyone.
As it stands though, Lfmmy is a disjointed, unorganized mess that if you aren't part of their clique, you're not welcome. If you say anything bad about linux, or star trek, or github, you get downvoted to hell. Ask me how I know.
Oh, and for the record, linux is ALSO a confusing hot mess for the average person. But until linux developers accept this, and make a linux distro that is as easy to understand as windows, it's userbase will remain something akin to a rounding error for windows userbase numbers. And I'm saying that as someone who's remaining on Windows 7, because everything since has been hot garbage.
There is a group of people who created a community here because their sub got banned. They cannot be more far from linux or tech, still they do well, their community is active and they are able to discuss.
Sometimes I feel like the complexity of Lemmy is exaggerated. People ask you about it, "go to Lemm.ee, use it the same way as Reddit. And as Reddit, don't hesitate to block political communities"
You're not gonna get many linux users respecting your opinion on tech if youre such an outlier. Windows 7? Cmon, ya gotta *expect* to get pushback on this right? Not just Linux nerds either... like *Who* do you tell this bombshell to and they're like "yeah ok that's normal?"
You are right. I made a post about why I liked my iPhone in the Apple Enthusiasts community, and some Lemmy users were furious.
That needs to stop. Did the moderators jump in?
No. My post got 40% down votes. One particular user insisted that I was using Samsung flaws as an excuse to like the iPhone. That I should admit that I just wanted an iPhone and my criticism towards Android were invalid.
I felt like talking to cultists. But I don't think mods needed to involve. Lemmy is what it is.
Sad to hear.
I think they should to an extend, especially if the topic is Apple, being Apple to like Apple products seems like an evidence.
I sometimes wish voting (or downvoting) could be limited to subscribers the subscribers of a community. Do you think this could help reduce cases like this?
I've seen your post. Ouch - you stumbled upon some nasty circlejerking there. On multiple levels.
Plenty people here expect you to treat their "vision" as above everything else. Including your agency ("free will"), issues that you might want to solve, etc. That makes them unable to tell the difference between "criticising Apple" (a fair thing to do) versus "treating someone who bought an iPhone as an emissary of Satan" (what they're doing against you).
To make things worse plenty muppets there are putting words in your mouth, regarding Samsung vs. Apple.
If it's any consolation, it isn't just Lemmy. The whole internet of the 20s feels like this nowadays.
TL;DR: I know that feel, bro.
People said the exact same thing about reddit being only good for technology enthusiasts and porn in the early days.
In my experience that is just how it goes on the internet. Nerds, furries, and porn collectors, are the early adopters for most places. The normies follow along years later.
I've heard the same kind of stuff about lots... *lots* of things that "will never catch on". Every one of those doomsayers were wrong. Some of them *unfortunately*, but still, they were all wrong.
Linux has been in existence for 30+ years. How long do you think it will take for Linux to overtake Windows or Mac? How long for it to even reach 10% of computer userbase? Because right now, after 30+ years, it's at an all time high of 4%.
I'm smoking weed about it.
If not simply moderated out of the community because 'fostering dialogue is an important goal'.
Lemmy will never take off since the whole federated platform is just too complicated ..
..Lenny being a huge propaganda platform for violent extremists and nut jobs doesn't really help much
After the Reddit API fiasco I came to see if Lemmy could replace it. In day two I think I saw a comment seriously suggesting that we must (and will) kill the rich. No satire, no joke. seriously suggesting that. In Reddit or any civilized platform that would have been an instant bannakd post removal.
After that I've noticed pure Hamas and Russian propaganda and a whole lot of what I've later learned to be "tankies" ranting (and promoting violence)
Lemmy is a cesspool of scum who would be (or already have been) shunned and banned in any other forum.
I've seriously thinking of swallowing my pride and going back to Reddit, where at least the users are decent if the company running it, isn't.
Lemmy will never take off and will remain a fringe platform. Reading the horrible bullshit posted here, that is a good thing.
if you don't believe me, see that business with c/vegan.
bye
Are you here for political discussions? - if yes, find communities that align with your views. !worldnews@lemmy.world is very different from !worldnews@lemmy.ml and !globalnews@lemmy.zip - if not, block them
On Reddit there are plenty of examples of subs with "eat the rich" content: https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1cx3ql2/eat_the_rich/
For the vegan thing, the vegans went to another instance, what would you have preferred to happen?
While I guess what you’re saying is true, I haven’t been confronted with such things during my 1-2 years on Lemmy. It also depends on the communities you subscribe to and political ones are probably more subjected to violence than others.