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.
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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.
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?
I try to ask questions here instead of reddit in the hopes that lemmy will pop up in google for someone.
I ask chatgpt first. It usually gives me decent ideas to test out.
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.
Yes, or if you find a solution you can post it here for preservation. I’ve posted some guides and info that i pulled from Reddit onto here because the way things are going, I can’t guarantee that information will still be available in a years time.
Preservation is so MASSIVELY important imo atm. With Internet Archive under fire, Reddit and Twitter closing APIs, Google shutting down fucking everything, we need OUR internet, not theirs and we need to protect that which is precious to us.
Exactly. While Lemmy isn’t exactly like the Internet archive, at least its self hosted so you could preserve anything you want for as long as you wanted on here
Agreed. And even if 1 instance goes down, if another instance is following, it’s still there. It’s potentially the strongest off site backup ever.
fediverse bringing back bulletin boards and forums would be a great thing.
the internet became a worse place when we lost bulletin boards and forums and got reddit and ai.
I think about Reddit-style platforms being the centralized bulletin boards and forums of these days, and Lemmy is closest we have to a DIY kind of thing which is controlled by the community.
Back in the day only a sufficiently tech savvy person could set up and run a forum software. Now everyone can do it, and with the Fediverse it’s all nicely interconnected, interoperable and truly free and open.
In general the Fediverse is the best shot we got right now to get back to the non-corporate Internet of my childhood and youth, I really hope it will succeed. And succeeding does not mean that it must grow and outcompete the commercial offerings, I think success is if enough motivated and interesting people join and participate. Quality > quantity.
Let’s DO IT! :-)
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.
Oh hell no. Lemmy is an extremely specific filter bubble and absolutely not suitable to replace even the worst search engine.
Agreed. About the only thing I would search Lemmy for is obnoxious Linux snobbery. That, they have on lock.
I’m not saying LEMMY specifically. I’m on Piefed Social. I’m saying ANYWHERE on the Fediverse. Find your platform, build your platform.
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 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.
Eh, if the information already exists on the web somewhere, why reiterate it? Seems excessive to insist on asking on the Fediverse unless that information can’t be found on a search engine or through AI.
Why not share it here? WHy not free the information? Someone could delete their Reddit post or Google could change their algorithm again tomorrow to suit their own needs. We’re currently accepting the old system that’s showing it can’t be trusted. I say free the information. I might be naive though, but I have to try at least.
You need to remember first of all what sites like reddit, digg, and now Lemmy actually are. They are link aggregators. The content is anything and every thing. Just link to it. It’s that simple. And if you feel it is in a place that might get removed, screenshot it, archive.org it, copy into an online Google Doc, and post that. There’s no reason we need 500 identical “How do I do X?” posts just to fill content. Do you want 500 posts clogging your feed about how to fix the same printer issue over and over?
I don’t want 500, but if I had a choice between finding it on the Fediverse or Reddit, I’d prefer the Fediverse personally.
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.
