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~
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.
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.
Unless we want more users.
Is there even a good alternative to Google? DuckDuckGo does not count to me as it is close source
Searxng
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 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.
deleted by creator
You are assuming the point of this is to be famous rather than non profit niche community driven
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.
but Lemmy already does show up on Google results
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
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.
And that’s OK. The Internet was better before everyone was using it.
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’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.
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.
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?”
If you say anything bad about linux, or star trek, or github, you get downvoted to hell
If not simply moderated out of the community because ‘fostering dialogue is an important goal’.
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.
