this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Yes and no. My daily scrolling habit has been moved to lemmy and I haven’t really felt any loss.
However, and this is a big caveat: Reddit remains a huge source of institutional knowledge. Half a dozen times weekly I’ll look something up and the most relevant answer/discussion will be from Reddit. As I understand it, lemmy will never fulfill this need, because it’s not scraped the same way Reddit is? Or perhaps I’ve misunderstood something about the way federation works. If that’s true, it’s a huge blow to the long-term use of lemmy v. Reddit.
I wonder if that could be built into it. Reddit was not a very useful place for information in 2011. Then the communities came.
Right, I may be totally misunderstanding the problem.
If it’s just that lemmy needs time and interaction from the community to build that knowledge, then great! No problem. But what I understood was that lemmy’s communities and conversations simply aren’t made accessible to wide-searching like that.
Looking at the /robots.txt file on a few different instances, there's nothing preventing Google or any other web crawlers from indexing Lemmy. I was even able to find some posts by searching
site:lemmy.ml.I think part of it is that all the separate instances make for bad SEO. And there just isn't enough content here yet to compete with Reddit and other search rankings. Hopefully it'll keep growing and eventually take over.
Okay, sounds like I did misunderstand. I’m happy to be wrong, thanks for explaining!
Google and other search engines can crawl lemmy just fine. The only downside is that the information will be split across domains unless google puts in a special case for lemmy/fediverse or something.
Yeah, I think I did misconstrue the actual issue. SEO might not be as strong, but everything can be searched just as well. Great!