this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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That feeling when you're googling the answer to some technical question, and your own Lemmy post appears 4 results down. (lemmy.one)
submitted 1 year ago by MxRemy@lemmy.one to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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Hopefully this kind of content is ok here. Up until recently, when I would be searching for some kind of technical info, the top (and best) results would usually all be Reddit posts. I was very pleasantly surprised to do that this time and find a Lemmy post instead!

...It did happen to be a post from me, so unfortunately didn't answer my question at all, but I still thought it was really neat and wanted to share. Has anyone else seen Lemmy stuff getting indexed and turning up in their search results?

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[–] t0fr@lemmy.ca 136 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Pretty cool to start seeing Lemmy posts in search results

[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 55 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Gotta keep this up! So much of my google results are Reddit forum posts

[–] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 1 year ago

At least now I'm starting to see those results as "Fuck /u/Spezz This post removed by "

[–] original_reader@lemm.ee 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So many Reddit posts are removed and useless. And often these posts used to be the main answer. I don't bother much with Redditt anymore. It's not the knowledgebase it used to be. Will likely never be again.

Some questions I "reask" here on Lemmy and get decent replies. Thus building a new knowledgebase.

[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That’s exactly what all of us should do. Thank you for being proactive. We need more of you.

[–] Cube6392 28 points 1 year ago

This could be a big help to growing the overall threadiverse community since growth after the reddit bump has stalled. Not saying growth is intrinsically the goal, but rather that organic rather than force growth (which is how we got most of the users here) is preferable

[–] neutron@thelemmy.club 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hope the indexed instances don't get taken down years down the road, or have some sort of independent archive to consult later.

[–] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago

That's my biggest worry, however I've been programming for like 15 years now and there are forums I posted to that no longer exist, so I think its just a symptom of information as a whole.

Reddit was the bastion for this kind if stuff for a long time, and now there are a bunch of posts by this guy named [deleted] that have no post body so make of that what you will

[–] Holodeck_Moriarty@lemm.ee 53 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey, does that mean we're finally googleable? That's pretty cool.

[–] Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 1 year ago

Time to start injecting my posts with SEO nonsense

[–] RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml 45 points 1 year ago

You know it's a unique question when lemmy is on the front page.

[–] anonymoose@lemmy.ca 43 points 1 year ago

Lemmception

[–] mark@programming.dev 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Take that, Stack Overflow! Programming.dev on deck!!!! Let's gooooooo

[–] lemann@lemmy.one 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly think Programming.dev is very well positioned to become a "programming reddit" of sorts. Nice polished sounding domain name, and a discussion platform visually similar to Discourse but with the grunt of the fediverse behind it.

The only thing holding it back is probably a setting for showing local communities by default, when logged out browsing. Whenever that feature arrives in Lemmy then 👌

[–] snowe@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

hm. when I test in a private browsing mode it shows Local by default. That doesn't happen for you?

also:

I honestly think Programming.dev is very well positioned to become a “programming reddit” of sorts. Nice polished sounding domain name, and a discussion platform visually similar to Discourse but with the grunt of the fediverse behind it.

is exactly what I was going for when I created the instance so I'm glad to see others think it could succeed!

[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 year ago

I've noticed Lemmy appearing more in search results already. It's nice

[–] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huh did Google start indexing lemmy?

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Funnily enough my own instance has a such a bad SEO that when I searched up my username (to find out what is out there) I found all other instances my comments got copied to but not my own freaking instance.

Oh well. Yes Google does index instances but how well and often is another story.

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Some instances disabled crawling, namely lemmy.ca

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But why? Part of why reddit became so useful was its ability to use it for searching. Even though I no longer visit reddit regularly anymore, I still use site:reddit.com on many of my google searches because it gets better results for opinion or explanation based topics. Similarly, I found tons of useful local info from my local city's subreddit. I can't say the same about the Lemmy community, which I only see if I explicitly remember to go to it because the sorting doesn't show small instances.

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I... don't know. Performance? Doesn't matter anyway, because it's all federated.

You can do site: lemmy.world and find lemmy.ca posts since they're federated.

[–] lemann@lemmy.one 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

appreciateUsefulInfoCallback(true, setVeryLoud);

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Don't forget to nest your callback a few levels deep, that way it's easier to use.

[–] syzizeky@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe google downranks db0 instance like it does other pirate sites?

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Sounds like a possibility.

[–] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly don't think Google crawlers knows how to index the fediverse but I am kind of talking out of my ass rn.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Fediverse is just another website. It literally finds my username on many other instances posts got replicated to.

[–] JWBananas@startrek.website 23 points 1 year ago

So you know those buttons at the top of Google search results?

Images, News, Videos, etc?

You'll never guess what new button they're testing out now.

https://imgur.com/a/bnOv1W7

[–] PuddingFeeling907@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 year ago

Heres comes the internet hug of death ;)

[–] magikmw@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago

Your first mistake was unironically using google to search for anything in 2023.

[–] anonymoose@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago

That's huge! Makes me realize that there's not really a way for anybody to know that a particular result is from Lemmy/the fediverse by looking at it, especially with the weird TLDs people use. I wonder if Google will eventually start recognizing ActivityPub clients differently?

[–] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Programming.dev is a great instance

[–] hex@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

Yessir

[–] gothicdecadence@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Maybe try SearXNG?

https://github.com/searxng/searxng

https://searx.space/

Or maybe something like https://perplexity.ai to point towards where to look

[–] jasondj@ttrpg.network 4 points 1 year ago

Happens to me all the time with my Networking, Fortinet, Ansible, and Cisco subreddits, and that’s exactly why I’m hesitant to purge and delete my account.

That and I haven’t found comparable communities here.

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 3 points 1 year ago

That is super neat. Google needs to put a fediverse, lemmy, or mastodon logo beside the result imo

[–] elouboub@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Probably easier to archive as well without all the bs javascript stuff that new reddit is doing.

[–] 257m@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do I make DDG only returns results from lemmy. Usually you can make it only return results from a specific website (like reddit.com) but you can't do that because of different instances.

[–] Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago

That's a problem I notice with Lemmy. You can point search engines at specific instances but not all instances which makes finding content that's only present on Lemmy very difficult.

[–] mo_lave@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago

based