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~

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    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.

    Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure

    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.

    • 2pt_perversion@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      type site:lemmy.world in front of your search if using google. You can combine multiple instances with the OR operator ie site:lemmy.world OR site:programming.dev this 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).

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
        0·
        11 days ago

        I’m aware of the site:example.com google 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?

  • over_clox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    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

    • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      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.

    • morrowind@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      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

      • over_clox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        11 days ago

        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…

        • idiomaddict@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          11 days ago

          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 accent 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.

          • over_clox@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            11 days ago

            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.

            • idiomaddict@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              11 days ago

              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

      • over_clox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        11 days ago

        Meh, true that. Hell, I dunno how to properly cross post on Lemmy, nor do I bother doing that anyways so whatever. 🤷‍♂️

    • Lemminary@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      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.

    • MarkalAlvarez@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      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.

      • over_clox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        11 days ago

        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.

    • Annoyed_🦀 🏅@monyet.ccEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      The only spelling error I spotted is right at the end where you said Mask and not Musk.

      It’s a wordplay. I personally call him Melon Husk.

  • atmur@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • badbrainstorm@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    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!

    • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      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.

      /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.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    Lemmy is search indexable. It includes the necessary metadata headers to link back to original domains as well, something other ActivityPub implementations forgot.

    The user base on Lemmy is tiny compared to Reddit, though. Same with Mastodon vs Twitter. The problem isn’t search indexing, it’s the user base being several orders of magnitude smaller.

    If you search for topics where Lemmy has a lot of posts (Linux distros, for instance), you can already find Lemmy in the search results every now and then.

  • istanbullu@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    I don’t understand the Fedievrse objection to search indexing. Search indexing is the most important piece of what makes the internet.

  • I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      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.

    • MarkalAlvarez@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      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.

  • captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.orgEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    Isn’t Lenny 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.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    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.

  • ricdeh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • herrvogel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      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.

      • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        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.

  • gnu@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      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!

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    Listen, it’s hot 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.