If the Fediverse gets big enough search engines wil probably optimize for it e.g. prioritizing the instance of the community…
Comment on Lemmy posts are starting to pop up on search results for Google (+ other search engines)
phoneymouse@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
emhl@feddit.de 1 year ago
ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 year ago
“Good 4k tvs without bloat, site:lemm… oh.”
NickNak@lemmy.world 1 year ago
One of the main reasons reddit mega turned to shit was due to far too many people joining and using it, granted this is due to mobile phones but is it really worth it to attract more and more people? These instances are run by average people not corps with money they can easily collapse under tuw burden of to many
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The cool thing about the fediverse is that if grows to much where and the moderation turns to crap on some instances, you can always defederate from those problem instances and avoid the trouble makers entirely. Instance admins can always turn off sign ups when they feel like they have reached their limits for moderation as well. And users can always self host their own instances and only let the people they trust sign up. The fediverse is more resilient than traditional corporate run social media
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Reddit is not moderated by paid corporate employees. It’s all volunteer labor.
NickNak@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Moderation is not the issue, the sheer cost to host the tremendous amount of data is very likely to be a reason an instance goes down, thats what I’m getting at
Vub@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Lionel@endlesstalk.org 1 year ago
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.
amju_wolf@pawb.social 1 year ago
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
otter@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
At first I was thinking a GUID might be impossible because of federation, but a simple implementation might be the home instance’s post ID
So something like
Display lemmy.ca/c/cats/123444 for
lemmy.ca/post/123444Display lemmy.world/c/cats@lemmy.ca/1234444 for
lemmy.world/post/98736density@kbin.social 1 year ago
bit.ly for lemmy
JohnWorks@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Would another option be like having every post have some kind of anchor of invisible text or something with “lemmy” so when I search for “best washing machine lemmy” it’ll show all posts across instances or something. Idk if that’s how SEO works entirely though.
Ullallulloo@civilloquy.com 1 year ago
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
Vub@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Thanks, I didn’t know that and never bothered to look. But then you still have the (SEO) issue of all the domains vs one in the case of Reddit or Quora or Stack Overflow. But yeah, a few very large Lemmy instances will probably start to rank well once they have enough good content.
amju_wolf@pawb.social 1 year ago
Didn’t know that’s the case, that’s neat though it doesn’t solve the redirect back to your home instance.
It’ll also probably lead to centralization because if you’re more likely to find a particular instance through search and decide to join Lemmy you’re probably going to do so on that instance.