Can we all stop the in-fighting for a minute and realise how awesome the platform we are on is?
We are forming communities on the realized image of the internet that we were told we would have back in the 80s and 90s.
You can make your own home on the web and have your own niche community, not owned by any corporation, while still being connected to the wider internet.
This feels like something out of a sci-fi movie.
Methinks you have been so busy trying to fight that you didn’t realise that nobody else is fighting.
However, there’s a slight issue with ‘still being connected to the wider internet’ as I don’t see results for Lemmy content appearing in my searches the way Reddit content comes up.
So it feels rather like a sci-fi movie when you’ve had too many mushrooms - kind of bright, but a bit confused…
However, it does help focus that idea that - if we are going to have interesting discussions and create information which is archived - it shouldn’t be inside Reddit, and it should be accessible by search.
So Lemmy is half way there…
The search engines are increasingly becoming enshitified anyway. I no longer think being found on Google is going to be the hallmark of success long term it was purported to be. We need a new search paradigm. And I don’t just mean reinventing search engines. I mean new ways of organizing content and answering search queries. Or better funding models for indexed search.
I think you could really plot the decline in usability of Google search over the last 10 years. SEO and algorithms have really ruined the user experience.
You know what? I agree. Even over the last few months, I’ve seen it in action.
Before the blackout stuff began, I used to have to manually include the word “reddit” for reddit to even show up for most of my queries. Now, I can barely google anything without reddit showing up right near the top of the results.
Shenanigans, I tell ya.
Consider this- so many people were just adding reddits to their search queries that it became something that was more standard than queries without a specific website.
Seems pretty obvious to me…
Chill, it’s nothing to be serious about :)
I mean, it’s also possible that I have just been searching different criteria, but a casual observation is just a casual observation at the end of the day. An anecdote is just an anecdote. I didn’t realise that I should have also had to mention all other possible causes lol.
“Obviously”, other causes are also possible. Maybe my home network remembers frequent use of the website. Maybe it’s the large number of clicks that come from those google results.
SEO is a double edged source. There is the negative side where it’s just about promoting your website. But there’s the positive where it’s making the website easier for a search engine to navigate. Not only can that produce higher quality search results, but it can also mean that it is more accessible for people with disabilities.
Case in point: a website made with images without alt text to replace text was a not uncommon sight until fairly recently. Now that is usually achieved with CSS, or there is at least alt text. Having those is critical both for search engines and accessibility.
I think we need decentralized search, or rather federated search if possible. Something akin to Lemmy and kbin for search. I’m not sure what the implementation would look like, but it needs to happen I think.
This is sort of what YacY is, but it’s not super user friendly.
Just a dedicated crawler for Fediverse and olde farte Internet would be a vast improvement.
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