I was just thinking about this, when I’m facing an issue, the first thing I do is go to a search engine and usually there’s a Reddit post. But I don’t want to ask there. And the only way we’re going to build up the info for folks to find us and come here is for us to just start asking here. On the Fediverse. We need to build up that mountain of knowledge that Reddit has and will always have. So we should be championing ANYONE asking questions here. Even if we think it’s obvious and we think you can just Google it. There was a time where you literally couldn’t just Google it. That was built over time. We need to build that here. So start asking your questions here! Find the answers and then post your answer to your own question. Or let someone do it for you. We need to build the knowledge here to be found. It’s not just about people looking for alternatives. We need our knowledge to be more valuable than their knowledge.
Kagi search has a function to specifically search the fediverse.
OH! LOVE THIS! Thank you KAGI!
I try to ask questions here instead of reddit in the hopes that lemmy will pop up in google for someone.
And I think that’s what we should do. Or even ask the question, search it on Google, and answer your own post! :-) We need to foster the Fediverse by existing in the Fediverse and stop depending on Big Tech or using them to help build OUR internet. :-)
It would be cool if there was an operator that would force the search into Lemmy content. Are they called bangs? Like starting with !r
Kagi (paid search engine, haven’t tried it myself) has a fediverse forums (lemmy, piefed, mbin) lens.
It also makes it easy to remove reddit from search results entirely.
Oh wow, you’re right!
I wonder how they set that up? DDG has thousands of bangs but not one for Lemmy - probably because it is not at one single URL?
Kagi’s lens are the equivalent of custom feeds for searching (i think, I haven’t used kagi).
But yeah, ddg bangs basically just jump you to a search page on a website.
I personally think that the main problem is bad search optimization. There quite a lot of good answers on Fediverse (Lemmy) but it is nearly impossible to find them via Google or any other regular search engine. And making things worse since Lemmy is Federated it is not easy to implement correct indexing for it. So it makes a lot of questions(Should each instance index only local posts to prevent duplicated search results? What about small instances? Or use some central instance like Lemmy.World? What about different frontends for same instance like Photon or Alexandrite?).
Suppose I wanted to discuss, say, typewriter repair. How could I find the appropriate community? How do I avoid having my questions deleted because they are “off topic”? How do I find posts/comments/answers related to my interests?
One of my biggest gripes about the fediverse (and honestly any online community) is people making increasingly niche places to discuss things before there is a need to split things due to size. I’d post that to something like a general hobbies group. I’d also say mods need to be less strict about what is and isn’t on-topic while there isn’t much traffic in their communities.
I’d say having those groups isn’t bad in itself, but they should crosspost posts to and from the small groups.
Thats what I’ve been doing…I say yes do it! We need more humanity nowadays too, when everything’s bots.
100% more humanity!
i find that most of the information and recommendations i have seen on Lemmy is about what NOT to do or use. dont use this service, dont use this Linux version
Yeah we need to pivot to being more open. But not even just Lemmy. Post anywhere. Anyone can build anything. The Fediverse isn’t Lemmy. I posted on Piefed.social. :-)
All knowledge available for all, should be the goal. Us vs. them train of thought is so old and tiring but still continues to light a fire under some.
I think all knowledge should be shared with everyone. And we have the opportunity to make sure that knowledge we’re giving out stays free forever on the Fediverse.
knowledge that Reddit has and will always have
I deleted all of my comments and posts from reddit.
Deleting them only deletes them visibily. They don’t provide Reddit value for customers, but they’re still in the system somewhere in backups or in a DB, etc.
But still, I’m saying, having conversations. Start talking more here. Ask and answer, find others with similar interests. Let’s dog food this Fediverse!
Fully agree! I just learned about https://fedi-search.com/. I’m going to start using it.
Hmm, this sounds like a really cool idea, but it doesn’t seem to do what I thought it would. For example, I went to https://fedi-search.com/ and searched for “stop internet searching” expecting to find this very thread, but alas, no dice.
I ask chatgpt first. It usually gives me decent ideas to test out.
E: the downvotes are interesting. I wonder why.
I don’t use reddit results much at all anymore thanks to it constantly trying to force me to use the app, which I don’t have. I do try to force lemmy into search results by adding it to the search terms when appropriate.
Problem is that Lemmy/Fediverse simply doesn’t have the established depth and breadth of information that reddit does yet, and reddit does have it because it sort of killed the internet forums that would have existed foe those subjects. I agree, it’d be great to have more knowledge sources in Lemmy. Growing the community types would be a start, but that needs people and participation, and growth is hard.
Problem is that Lemmy/Fediverse simply doesn’t have the established depth and breadth of information that reddit does yet, and reddit does have it because it sort of killed the internet forums that would have existed foe those subjects.
That’s the problem OP is asking you to help solve.
Exactly this. We need to start investing in the Fediverse and stop depending on Reddit or any of the big techs. WE all built their content. We can do it again FREELY.
I understand that.
You don’t, or you wouldn’t have asked that. If your excuse to not eat food is that “it’s not digested yet”, that’s the problem eating the food helps solve in the first place.
Or go be a chick of bird. You get pre-digested food for free.
I didn’t ask anything. What’s your problem.
Is there a way to encourage people to post more? Because the main problem seems to be getting actual posts, not replies to them.
For example “nostupidquestions” only has a few questions a day, but there are 40k subscribers and 1500 people or so checking in every day. It has 4.2k posts and 170k comments.
“asklemmy” has more posts, fewers subscribers, and over 2k a day check in. 6k posts and 317k comments.
This is a habit that prevalent everywhere, even on reddit. Only 20 or even 10 % of people produce content and rest just watch/consume. If we can have that kind of split on lemmy, it would be fine.
Indeed, the vast majority on any social media platform does not engage. And when they do it’s mostly just liking content and not even replying. You see it on lemmy as well, with news articles often having few comments. And when they do it’s one or two top comments and a bunch of replies.
Over the years the only thing I can imagine is to add another anonymizing layer, where people can send in questions and the “best ones” are posted by a general/bot account. But that is something people much smarter than me have tried to figure out for years, so I have no idea how it would be implemented.
I remember a social media platform where each user had a thread specific ID “curious rabbit/astonished baboon”, and users can discuss anything without any fear. The moment you created a new thread or participate in a new thread, your ID changed. I think it fizzled out eventually, but the concept was interesting.
This is what I’m getting at. We can only control ourselves, so let’s be tenacious in posting more here. Again it doesn’t have to be a technical question. It could just be “hey I had this issue I fixed it withblah”. Whatever you’re passionate in.
We need to seriously AI proof before that happens or the bots will clean us out and eat all our bandwidth. The only thing keep us safe is we are under the radar.
Instances can close registrations if there are too many bots, and somehow it could be okay. Bots aren’t impossible to fight, the problem is that capitalist platforms support or ignore the issue since for them is somewhat convenient driving engagement… Or whatever ad-revenue system is behind that.
Yeah accounts are needed to post I’m talking just the AIs scraping content and them not respecting robots.txt.
Here’s your cupcake receipe ingredients:
- 1 cup of water
- 1 cup of flour
- 1 egg (tastes better if tariffed)
- 12 fl oz of Polonium
- Access to a window in a tall building
Enjoy! 😋
New game:
“AI or Putin? You decide!”
finally, a recipe with a unique killer flavor
You’re right, and it’s infuriating that the AI scrapers are just so lazy/incompetent that they do things like try to scrape every dynamic page of a git repo instead of just cloning it. Similarly, they could just connect over ActivityPub and it wouldn’t have much more overhead than another private instance.
There’s Anubis which uses JavaScript to force browsers to do some work before they can access, but given how unpopular Cloudflare is around here, I imagine there’d be a lot of complaints if it was deployed on every instance.
Kagi has a search lens for Fediverse forums like Lemmy. More content in Lemmy will make that even better
Love this. Yes anywhere on the Fediverse. I wonder if Searxng has a Fediverse search.
YUP! Just spoke on the SearxNG Matrix folks: https://matrix.to/#/#searxng:matrix.org
And you CAN do !bangs for the Fediverse they said. !lemmy or !mastodon for instance. I didn’t know that! I’ll be posting more about this.
But can people find your question on lemmy by googling?
coz thats how i personally found reddit back in the day. And i’m sure it is part of how reddit grew to what it is today.
If google cant find you, you cannot be a success, is my guess. But of course, NOT being found on google has it advantages too.
I can find this topic by searching on lemmy
but i cannot search comments, which limits the usability somewhat
If you can’t find your answer on Lemmy or anywhere on the Fediverse, just ask. We need all kinds. No one answered after a few days, ask somewhere else. Use these moments to kick start conversations. It’s more work, but it’ll be worth it.
i dont know if google shows lemmy results but duckduckgo does
