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

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

www.google.com/search?q=Lemmy+wouldn't+really+tak…

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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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

i don’t want lwmmy to take off, i like it rn

On Kagi there’s a fediverse lens (basically a filter)

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.

Try searching Google for “Saganumenousness”

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.

And that’s OK. The Internet was better before everyone was using it.