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~

  • captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.orgEnglish
    60·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    492·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • BaldManGoomba@lemmy.worldEnglish
    454·
    3 months ago

    You are assuming the point of this is to be famous rather than non profit niche community driven

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    393·
    3 months 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.

  • Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    321·
    3 months 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.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
    30·
    3 months 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
      7·
      3 months 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
        11·
        3 months 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?

  • Peppycito@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    231·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      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?

      • Peppycito@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        131·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • cakeistheanswer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          4·
          3 months ago

          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.

        • mark@programming.devEnglish
          3·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • Peppycito@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            41·
            3 months ago

            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.

            • mark@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              3 months ago

              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.

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      The “instances hosting communities” structure alleviates albeit not solves this problem; communities about related topics end in the same instances, that you can block.

  • Xylight@lemdro.idEnglish
    15·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      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.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    195·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    121·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • mark@programming.devEnglish
      17·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          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 UI aren’t a pedophile just choose an alternative and use the same credentials to sign in make 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.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            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…

  • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyz
    11·
    3 months ago

    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.

      • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        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.