Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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founded 2 years ago

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On the future of Lemmy vs reddit (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:

I wouldn't worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)
Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn't fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren't yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.
Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit's leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

One problem I see:

You can google site:reddit.com whatever But if you google site:lemmy.world whatever then you're losing a significant amount of results. To get good results, you need to know which Lemmy instances is likely to have your answer, and with communities duplicated over different servers, that can be tough.

In the end I find I prefer this federation model, although I'm not sure although I'm a bit concerned about funding it if it scales up to the size of Reddit (same with Mastodon vs twitter).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Google should be finding searches with "lemmy" keyword, but it isn't at the moment.

Lemmy needs some SEO people.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Lemmy contents are replicated by federated servers, so you might find what you want by using site:lemmy.world or other big instances because they might also has replicated contents from other smaller instances.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sure the search problem will be solved somehow. Like all the content is on each instance so its just a case of it being accessible and indexed by google I guess?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sure it's already being indexed by Google. But people like to add site filters like site:Reddit.com or site:stackoverflow.com to prevent google from barfing up a bunch of garbage results on the front page, when they know that's probably where the results they want will be. There is no way to add a Lemmy-wide filter to a Google search, because Lemmy instances are all different sites

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Does it actually matter though because Lemmy contents are replicated by federated servers, thus big Lemmy instances such as lemmy.world might have contents from smaller federated instances as well. Try using site:lemmy.world next time and see if it'll improve the search result, though Lemmy.world is just 2 months old so maybe Google hasn't indexed it all

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's a good point. If you filter by a major site, then it'll have content from all the major communities.

That won't help if you're looking for niche content, but that's not as important.

I wonder how replicated data shows up to the indexer. I don't know enough about search engine indexing or SEO. Will google index replicated data? Presumably it won't index feeds or searches, it'll index the actual posts, and I wonder if replicated posts are considered posts for the purposes of indexing or if the indexer will only look at local posts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Welcome to the old Internet. Decentralization is good in a way, people will have to try harder instead of having everything spoon fed to them by Google.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I'm not personally a fan of that brand of elitist gatekeeping. Having it be harder to keep out the plebs is not a look I think we wanna get behind.

Decentralization is important, but the goal isn't to keep people out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

People having to work harder is good? No I disagree with that entirely.

Part of what makes reddit so amazing is the amount of amazing knowledge and answers you can find from google.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ideally it would be popular enough that you wouldn't need the site modifier. Google would see that Lemmy has the most seen and perpetuated answer just like it sometimes does with Reddit now, whatever the instance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

People still often out the site modifier on just to prevent google from barfing up a bunch of crap they don't care about, even if they know that Reddit results will be near the top.