this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Lemmy and other federated systems being spread out across individual instances does make things more difficult. Normally you could just do "site:reddit.com" and automatically filter all results to be from Reddit. But you can't do that because your result could be on any one of hundreds of instances, many of which do not have "lemmy" in their title.
It appear reasonably large instances like lemmy.one have been indexed, i got results using site:lemmy.one. and for those larger instances, they should still be able to index federated content.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, but lemmy.one has basically no content on it other than the 8 communities that @jonah has created or allowed there. The whole point of that server is to allow people to simply login and then participate in other instances from there.
That is all to say, lemmy.one would be one of the "smaller" instances from a standpoint of content to be indexed by Google.
In order for users on lemmy.one to interact with content on other instances, lemmy.one has to import and host that content. So, it has plenty of content on it, just most of it originated elsewhere. That remote content should be just as indexable as local content.
I think it would be best if each post had a canonical tag pointed at the originating server’s version of that post. The lemmy ui generates a canonical tag now but I’m not sure it doesn’t just point to itself.
This sounds like a good idea for an issue on the Lemmy github.
Now that I'm on desktop, I checked and this was just added in 0.18.2: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1418
The weird thing (which they're also discussing elsewhere in this thread: https://upvote.au/comment/148846) is that it links to OP's instance rather than the community's instance.
I didn't quite realize that, figured that when you were viewing another instances' content it was loading from that instance. I guess that means that Lemmy content across all instances has loads of redundant copies.
Yup. It's mirrored content all the way down.
Noob question here. Does that mean each instance must hold the totality of the content it knows about?
Yes it does. But only content created after subscribing to that community.
I'm not sure how lemmy or kbin handle instance-hosted media links -- whether they import the media and redirect the link, or whether they point to the original media object -- but otherwise, yes.
There are ways to access other websites directly from within a given website -- iframes and the like -- but that's not what happens here. Each website is independent of each other, and all text is locally hosted in your instance's database.
There are also (limited) copies of user profiles all over the place -- if you click on my username, for instance, you'll be taken to lemmy.world/u/Kichae@kbin.social. That's a local lemmy.world user address, even though I'm not on lemmy.world. I can't login to that account -- it's either credentialless, or has randomized credentials -- but it exists. And by going there, you get to see what lemmy.world knows about my activity across the fediverse. Without ever leaving lemmy.world.
Thanks a lot for the explanation!
Probably talking about lemmy.world