We did it, Reddit
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Watch spez squirm every time lemmy improves
spez wants to remove Reddit from Google actively, so at least for this specifically I sincerely doubt he minds. Of course, the main reason he wants thatis only that he wants to inflate Reddit's perceived investor value, so not sure what that even helps. But eh.
Spez is a maroon
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Now, off to solve a bombing
Reddit is talking about hiding Reddit from Google. I hope they do that because it will let Lemmy start to replace Reddit as the go to source for non-SEO, real-human answers.
Except each instance has its own URL meaning ranking for ANYTHING is extremely hard since each domain’s rank will always be weak in the sea of others. Each is even being penalised by the algorithm if there are duplicate content mirrored between different URLs. It’s the weakness of the fediverse if we are to follow how search engines have worked in the last decades. Maybe it will lead to new search engines (I hope so) but right now it is not going to work well to replace for example Reddit … or rank well in general at all.
I wonder if there’s a way around this that we can create, instead of doing nothing or hoping google adapts.
Like a dummy instance that catalogues everything on all instances (but also links to the original posts) for the purpose of showing up on google search.
Since this instance isn’t for posting but for search engine indexing, there may be some otherwise undesirable micro-optimizations that can help improve its chances of showing up.
Yes, this would be possible (and not too hard technically either). But all instances would have to agree to link this instance as canonical.
You'd also want to add a feature where you can set you home instance where this canonical instance would redirect you (perhaps even automatically). Home Assistant does something like that.
What pisses me most about Lemmy is that each instance has its own post IDs which means that crosslinking and switching instances based purely on URLs is impossible.
IMO posts should have random GUIDs for IDs; that would help a ton with these kinds of issues. It'd then be trivial for Google to detect same content (if they wish) this way
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Each post refers to the poster's home domain as the canonical URL, regardless of which instance you're viewing it on specifically to avoid duplication SEO concerns
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If the Fediverse gets big enough search engines wil probably optimize for it e.g. prioritizing the instance of the community...
"Good 4k tvs without bloat, site:lemm... oh."
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I use duckduckgo and lately have been adding Lemmy at the beginning (like I did Reddit) and it really works. Search results come back if there is a discussion going on about the topic.
I've not tinkered around with it too much yet, but how has your experience been with actually viewing the results? I would imagine that most results are statically likely to be for an instance other than the one you have an account on, requiring a few extra steps to load the post in your home instance if you wanted to vote/comment on it.
This is one of those UX things that I think is still holding Lemmy back from more mainstream adoption, imo.
It's hit and miss most of the time. I just tried Lemmy memes and it redirects to lemmy.ml and the memes community.
Then I tried Lemmy how do I wash my kitten and there was an answer. Again for Lemmy ml. I think it depends on whether there is a post answering the question and if people commented on it.
You can make that a bit less painful with browser extensions. 'Instance Assistant for Lemmy & kbin', for example, will always show a button to open a page in your home server. Not sure if there's anything exactly like it here yet but FediAct for Mastodon lets you like/boost/follow/comment on other servers directly, more or less eliminating the other-servers problem.
Swag. The more we show up in search, the more people will be asking "what the heck is Lemmy?" Some of 'em will join.
Well then. Here. We. Go.
I have been regularly sharing shit with friends that I see in Lemmy, and they always said to me why my links always have weird names and domains and shit... so I proceed to explain and we get to nowhere.
Anyway this is people that weren't even into Reddit, so that people are the harder to get, IMHO.
It really was silly of Lemmy to not have community specific links, it's even more confusing that way. Now it's just a bunch of
{weird-domain}/post/{number}
You never know what it is unless you have link previews
Yeah hopefully its possible to change that without breaking anything
without breaking anything
That wouldn't be the Lemmy experience, no hating here 😀
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I’ve had success describing it as “imagine you owned the server your Facebook info was stored on but could still interact with all other Facebook servers”. It’s a little simplified, but it usually gets the point across.
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Reddit, we're coming for you. Better watch your back. Sleep with one eye open. 😏
Let's fucking go
We did it, Lemmy
It would help a lot more with SEO-friendly URLs. https://lemmy.ml/post/7417691 is not very SEO friendly at all.
there's an issue here on that which could use support and boosting!
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The fediverse is no longer just a silly parallel universe now.
oh man i saw "google" and "+" and got nostalgia for early days google+
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Good! I love it here and I think others will too :)
This is neat.. I just tried “faceting lemmy” and my community came up on top.
Your community is neat! Subscribed :)
Consider promoting it on [email protected], or other similar communities
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Would I be contributing if I was using a mobile app like eternity or voyager?
Yes
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I have a question, I have posted with my lemmy.zip acccount to a community hosted on feddit.ro, and when I search the title only lemmy.world appears, even tho i didnt post it there, any idea why?
It means many people are using lemmy.world instance to view your post instead of lemmy.zip or feddit.ro.
Every instance stores what are essentially copies of everything it's users are subscribed to. So when you post "to" feddit.ro, you're posting to the copy on lemmy.zip. Similarly, Lemmy.world has their own copy (that for whatever reason is ranking higher in search) because someone there is presumeably subscribed to the community.
Adding a bit more to the other comments
The post should exist on all 3 instances (as well as any other instance federated with feddit.ro). However lemmy.world is bigger and so more people are likely linking to /from that instance, which mean Google is indexing it with higher priority.
The other instances should probably show up over time?
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That's cool. I seem to have issues finding this post, or the top post of the day (https://sh.itjust.works/post/8365139) by searching:
site:sh.itjust.works After watching the 2nd episode of 11th season of Futurama
And I'm not getting the correct result. Am I doing it right, but there's something else affecting the results (top of day for lemmy isn't as popular as needed to show up on google, bing, nor DDG)? or am I making a mistake somewhere?
I don't think the instance is the issue like the other comment is suggesting (although I don't quite understand the specifics of how it works). I'm playing around with it myself right now
If I search site:sh.itjust.works Hello and set it to 24 hours, I do see posts. So timing should be ok too
Update: So I think what's happening is that the post needs to go through a few stages when it's on a different instance
- Someone posts on a foreign instance (https://foreign.example.com/post/123444
- Someone on your instance views the post, which generates a link on your instance for that post (ex. https://example.com/post/135799)
- Google indexes your home instance and grabs that post
So we're probably between steps 2 and 3 right now?
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One big issue that Lemmy has because it's a distributed service is the dilution of results.
For example, there is only one Reddit domain (that people use to access the service) but there are hundreds/thousands of Lemmy domains and the dilution will continue to increase as Lemmy's popularity increases. It's either that or there will only be a couple of Lemmy instances that will dominate all of Lemmy.
Did the same thing, now the linked thread is shown and not the discution
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