Hi, recently I thought about lemmy and came into the conclusion, that it lacks one thing to be a true competition for reddit and stackoverflow and that is the search engine and user visibility.
Let’s say I want to fix some issue on my computer. I type the question into the browser and what?.. first 3 links lead to reddit, stackoverflow some random website or eventually quora. If there was answer to my question on any lemmy instance, I’d be lucky if it was on any of the 3 first browser pages. Also the fact, that the links of lemmy instances look well… not so standard, doesen’t help.
I think the solution would be to create one “central” instance, which wouldn’t have any users, but instead would aggregate posts from technical forums of other isntances. It would greatly improve search engine visibility and provide centralized access to content without dropping the federation philosophy. It would also help creating a brand, as everyone instead of searching for answers on reddit etc. would just go to lemmyhelp.xyz and look there, knowing it’s somewhat trusted and official source. Also moderation on such site would be MUCH easier, than on reddit or SO.
What do you think?
The ranking is determined by the number of links to a website, so the links will have to be edited so it will all link to the “big website”. also changing the link so it will be under your “home instance” might also cause problems (instead of X links you will have X/Y links where Y is the number of home instances).
That’s another reason to have some browser extension which will always redirect people to their home instance instead of putting the home instance in the link.
Not sure it is worth it.