A senior Google VP said earlier this month that Google users who couldn’t add “Reddit” to their queries were “not quite happy” following the protest.
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Yeah… that is pretty much the point of a protest. It is certainly not supposed to make people’s lives more convenient, and if convenience is unchanged then it means people probably don’t know you’re there.
Weaponized inconvenience is a powerful thing.
It’s their own damn fault for letting the algorithm have spammy/fake websites ride to the top of the search while legit sites are on the bottom. If you look for a product you get a full page or 2 of “bestVacuum.com” type of sites that are just paid sites pretending that they are reviewers.
If you are having issues with removed/blocked reddit solution you can check the cache in the google search but some sections don’t have them.
The problem is that Lemmy is not immune to this. Even Reddit was vulnerable, just not in the traditional ways.
If Lemmy grows to that level, we will 100% have a problem with SEO bots, fake reviews, etc. We are already seeing a problem with a particularly toxic instance, instances hosting potentially and widely illegal content, along with enormous and problematic walled gardens. (Names withheld because that’s not the point here)
I can only hope that as the codebase and community mature, we can address these issues before they become catastrophic.
If lemmy becomes as big as reddit will there be a workaround in place for this? Googling something without appending ‘site:reddit.com’ to the end is just worthless these days. I’m googling a lot less now. Will just adding ‘lemmy’ be enough without specifying a site?
Checkout the conversation here: https://lemmy.world/post/670532. This topic keeps coming up, so I’m hoping the solution I’m working on can resolve this exact issue.
We’ve got a LONG way to go before any site gets as big as Reddit. I’m just hoping between the fediverse and/or squabbles one of those will “win” enough to get a critical mass of users. I’m actually very happy with both, there is just not even a fraction of content compared to reddit in an hour (understandably so).
That should not be the goal.
Have we learned nothing?
There’s a balance. You’re right that growth for growth’s sake, linear and forever, is exactly what got reddit into this situation. That being said, the fediverse will still need a significant influx of users to increase content, especially in niche locations, to the point where the page feels fresh enough each day to make folks’ home base.
To be fair, the point of the fediverse is that despite them being different platforms, they can all communicate with each other seamlessly. Mastodon users can see and comment on this thread for example without ever leaving Mastodon. They can even make their own posts on lemmy without leaving Mastodon. So it really isn’t necessary for a single platform to gain enough critical mass to overtake Reddit. Even on a singular platform it’s technically made up of many different individually hosted sites that we call instances. So even if lemmy were to have more users than Reddit one day, it’s an arbitrary place to draw the line. Why not claim that a single instance has to reach that critical mass instead?
It will work with any bigger instance because of federation. All communities with subscribers from an instance are available on that instance. Si site:lemmy.world, site:programming.dev, etc. will work.
Probably, I’ve been googling with just “reddit” instead of “site:reddit.com” for a while and haven’t noticed any difference.
There’s nothing stopping google from indexing the fediverse. Arguably it’s easier than indexing webpages.
