Problem is that we’ll probably need a dedicated search engine for that. As answers are spread in lots of instances, some of them without “lemmy” in the name, I assume.
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Boozilla@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I am hoping (probably naively so) that lemmy’s stock of technical answers will continue to grow and eventually become a half decent archive for people to search for potential solutions.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
tea@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Seems like a solvable problem though. We have a list of federated servers inately built into activitypub, right? Just need to tag results from those servers as being linked to a “lemmy” keyword search.
I’m sure I’m oversimplifying it, but all the pieces are there, just need search engines to be smart about how they index. Since there are a couple of federation based models that would be good to index, not just lemmy, it would probably behoove them to figure it out.
xnx@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
Yeah but we need non technical stuff too which i what i hate about the ui and stuff mot trying to be made simpler for non tech people to start using lemmy. I want doctors, lawyers, and casual people asking questions about everyday items and stuff so i can search “best sleep mask lemmy” or any product category and find good discussions. Would also help if lemmy.com was an instance instead of just redirecting to lemm.ee
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I think we have to contribute our hours of UX assistance to see changes there. The brilliant engineers who donate their time probably both focus on working features first and specialize more in technical problem-solving than visual design.
xnx@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
I use voyager and its great but people will discover it through the website so its should be improved/simplified as well
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Highly doubtful.
The few times I have bothered to ask technical questions I mostly get one of the following:
- Ideological ranting. "The problem is you aren’t running arch linux in that corporate environment with proprietary hardware you need to interface with"
- Complete refusal to read the question. "I totally didn’t read that you said Foo was not viable for reasons XYZ but you should use Foo"
- Complete nonsense
Reddit has a lot of that too but ALSO has the institutional knowledge of people who actually care enough to answer. Similar to stack overflow.
I try to help where I can but this is an enthusiast “site”. So you have all the people who suggest all the crap they heard on linus tech tips rather than “Okay, for my day job we use X but no sane person should use that at home. Look into Y”.
fuzzzerd@programming.dev 1 month ago
Ephemeral discord servers are awful because they don’t scale and they can only ever help the lowest common denominator of questions/issues. We need something else, but it has yet to present itself as a solution.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
I’m sure you’ve had bad experiences but they actually scale as well as any forum ever did and are great because the general vibe is not “This was asked ten years ago, go figure out some search terms” and more actually responding to and helping people.
The key is to have a moderated support channel.
fuzzzerd@programming.dev 1 month ago
It’s a never ending onslaught of beginner questions and experienced folks with domain knowledge burn out. I’m sure it’s good when it’s new and fresh and everyone is exited to participate, but that wears out. It’s why things went away from mailing lists, or why mailing lists started getting archived, so they could be searched.
I guess with most things it comes in cycles, and we’re at the on demand answers cycle right now.
butter@midwest.social 1 month ago
Drop a link to a few places people ask tech questions and I will do my part to contribute
communism@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Really for technical answers things should be on a forum. Troubleshooting a linux distro, post on the distro’s forums. Troubleshooting a piece of software, make an issue on its codeberg/github/gitlab/etc. It makes sense that if you’re having an issue with a specific thing you ask for help on a forum dedicated to that thing. I don’t think it’s a positive that things are becoming centralised onto generalised social media, even for more decentralised federated social media like Lemmy. It just makes support for a given piece of software more spread out and harder to find.
Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
The most annoying thing with that is that you need an account for every little forum that you want to post in. But you are still right.
Sparky@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
This might be a hot take, but I hope that we as a platform are toxic enough to advertisers so that big tech’s enshittification and advertising never becomes a problem.
capital@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Twitter still has advertisers.
tea@lemmy.today 1 month ago
As I understand it, Lemmy, being FOSS, is pretty immune to this since there are no big tech shareholders to appease. Lemmy is susceptible to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) via something like Threads, however.
hotpot8toe@lemmy.world 1 month ago
tbh I’ve never seen a Lemmy link when searching for stuff. Is it too small to show up? Or do search engines not index Lemmy instances?
Dasnap@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’ve seen it a couple of times when searching on DDG.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
I’ve seen some when I appended “Lemmy” just like “Reddit”. But it relies on lemmy being in the domain name.
Also I assume even when people click on those results, they don’t get ranked much higher because it’s so many different domains while reddit is just one.
Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Kagi has a button that lets you search the fediverse. I haven’t tested it yet though.
madcaesar@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Adding lemmy does nothing for me, it searches for Lemingrad or some shit.
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You could always add “site:lemmy.world” to your search. I commonly do that, as well as the same for reddit or stack overflow.
_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
The problem with that is, lemmy.world is only one of many different instances. Too bad there isn’t a way to add a modifier that searches the entire fediverse.
olicvb@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
yea i’ve been doing “inurl:lemmy” for that reason
infeeeee@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Most of the originalish content on lemmy are linux related stuff, memes and porn. The latter 2 are mostly image/video based, so you don’t search for that very frequently and easily. I can see that in the future it will become a very relevant source of info in linux admin and user circles.
I go back to r*ddit sometimes for some local content which is non existent on lemmy. I see that the tech related subs are mostly dead there, or at least only shadows of their former selfs. E.g. go to r/linux, sort by top all time. In the first 100 results you will barely find anything posted after the exodus.
MudMan@fedia.io 1 month ago
Yeah, the notion that Lemmy is a Reddit replacement is misguided. It definitely doesn't have the same Q&A balance Reddit does. It feels a lot more like 90s and early 2000s forums than the large-scale self-service link and customer service churn Reddit encourages.
Which I'm all for. I was never a Reddit guy and I do like it here. But in terms of how bad it is now that Reddit is not happy to host most of the actually useful online content for free... well, that's a different conversation.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Yeah I mostly go back for r/BestofRedditorUpdates to get my trash drama fix and r/nursing to commiserate with my people. I’ve tried bringing in more hcw communities but sometimes its tiring to be the first of a few to move over. It elicits some pretty strong feelings of isolation.
NotAnotherLemmyUser@lemmy.world 1 month ago
One of the major problems with Lemmy is that many posts get deleted and that nukes the comment section (which is where most of the answers will be).
I wish Lemmy deleted posts closer to how Reddit deletes posts - the post content should be deleted, but leave the comments alone.
Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Searx will show Lemmy results, at least on some Searx instances.
Image
Gerudo@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Twice I have come across links to lemmy, definitely not the norm though.
chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 1 month ago
I’m inclined to think due to the nature of the platform, contents are constantly duplicated to the eyes of search engines, which hurts authoritativeness of each instance thereby hurts ranking.