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
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 one is Voyager for me but right below that is Lemmy world
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.
You are assuming the point of this is to be famous rather than non profit niche community driven
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.
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:
We could tell new users “Sign up on Lemmy.com and if you decide you
don’t like the UIaren’t a pedophile justchoose an alternative and use the same credentials to sign inmake sure you start blocking.”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…
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
The search page does allow all of this.
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
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
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. 🤷♂️
The only spelling error I spotted is right at the end where you said Mask and not Musk
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 🤷♂️
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…
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.
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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.
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.
