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?

  • 257mEnglish
    3•2 years ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      9•2 years 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.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•2 years ago

        Yup. lemmy seems to work okay, but it would miss something like !programming.dev since it doesn’t have lemmy in the name.

        If you know where the community is hosted, you can probably do site:instance and get decent results.

        What we really need is a better integrated search inside lemmy. That way I won’t feel the need to use a search engine as often. If that works, perhaps someone could make a single site that tracks all popular communities (just post comment, not comments) for better SEO, and then links to the actual posts. Kind of like those StackOverflow copy sites that I keep running into.

        • @[email protected]English
          7•2 years ago

          Crawling and indexing lemmy inter-instance would be an incredible boon to discoverability on the platform.

    • @[email protected]English
      30•2 years ago

      It’s not just reddit. They’re AI assisted buttons with more tabs for commons searches. Many people add “reddit” after a search to find answers specifically on reddit. It’s also catered differently per user so you might see TikTok or Quora as other buttons up top as well.

      Google search results will also slightly vary among users.

      • EinarEnglish
        21•2 years ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]English
          11•2 years ago

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

      • @[email protected]English
        33•2 years ago

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

    • The CuuuuubeEnglish
      28•2 years 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

    • @[email protected]
      English
      8•2 years ago

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

      • @[email protected]English
        10•2 years 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

  • @[email protected]English
    5•2 years 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.

    • @[email protected]English
      10•2 years ago

      I get it. Finding the answers to super niche questions is just about the only thing I still go to reddit for.

  • @[email protected]English
    16•2 years ago

    I’ve noticed that the quality of the questions and answers on technical topics has gotten noticeably worse since July. Not surprising these types of users would move away from Lemmy first. On the Ubuntu subreddit I’ve noticed a relative increase in confidently incorrect answers.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•2 years ago

      Ya, it still has a backlog of great answers to questions from the past, but hopefully as new questions are asked and new issues are brought up, Lemmy can grow that backlog as well.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•2 years ago

      If it weren’t bad for everyone overall, I would support intentionally giving wrong solutions on Reddit. As it is, I simply only go there now for the pre-lemmy knowledge as many do, though as Lemmy starts getting a deeper knowledge base I expect that will slowly change, I find the quality of both the questions and answers on Lemmy to be much greater nine times out of ten.

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏English
      22•2 years ago

      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 👌

      • snoweEnglish
        2•2 years 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!

  • moondog [he/him]English
    13•2 years ago

    One time I was looking up a question related to obsidian MD, only to find out there was a post about my exact issue, I open it, I’ve already upvoted it. I read closer, it’s my own post from 6mo ago.

  • @[email protected]English
    24•2 years ago

    there was this movie I liked a lot that I found hard to find people to discuss it with. I talked to a couple people about it on reddit one time, but that was really the extent of the discussions. Eventually I saw the movie again on TV and it got me wondering if there was anymore more info about it, like theories or whatever. So I Google it and come across this thread that looked interesting, and as I’m reading through I thought that this person knows what they’re talking about and has some good ideas. Eventually I realize it was my own comments I was looking at from before, I just didn’t recognize them at first. I’m actually retarded