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~

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[–] captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org 60 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 25 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It is and search engines do treat them separately, which is problematic, as seeing the same content on multiple domains may be seen as spammy and lead to downranking.

https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search tried to fix this, but was put on hold due to some perf issues with a lemmy update.

Kagi recently added a fediverse filter, though I barely use it because there are rarely good results. Just isn't much content worth searching on lemmy yet

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 32 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think this is true, Lemmy is already using rel="canonical" which should be telling Google what the real URL is, like here on programming.dev I see this in the page source

<link data-inferno-helmet="true" rel="canonical" href="https://lemmy.world/post/19493729">

which is why the Google results for this search don't show a million different instances mirroring it

https://www.google.com/search?q=Lemmy+wouldn't+really+takeoff+to+replace+Reddit+until+it's+content+is+search+indexable

https://www.semrush.com/blog/canonical-url-guide/

Here was the discussion about it where it was fixed last year https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1418

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 months ago

That's good, I didn't know about that. Although the problem does still seem to exist with

different software

and different frontends