r/selfhosted is still rising, WTF? Come to Lemmy!!!

peregus@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 781 points –

Hi all! I used to be a daily r/selfhosted lurker and a bit active user. Since the Reddit saga I thought that r/selfhosted would be one of the first and bigger community to move to Lemmy due to the IT knowledge of all of their users and the sensitivity about self host/privacy/open source, but I see that not only the community is still all there, but it's rising. :( That really makes me sad. How can we convince the mods there to move people here? Is it allowed to talk about Lemmy on Reddit or do we risk of being banned?

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The change will come once people start searching for stuff on Google and they get results which link back to lemmy. For that to happen we need people asking for help/feedback and getting their answers here.

The most useful comment in this entire thread, the search results are a bit of a mess currently and that's a huge stumbling block.

I tried a simple search query with lemmy and the way results come back is not good

it's going to take a long time for that to change but just as a casual user I doubt I'd click anything past the first few reddit links.

The fact we're on the first screen of results is progress! 🎉

It's definitely progress and seeing myself in one of the top results was nice but it's going to take a lot more work and tbh the decentralised nature of the links might also hurt because clicking on the dbzero link looks like a hackerman link if you know what I mean

You can't do site:website.com due to all the different instances

I'm happy to help provide answers on my fields of interests but they are pretty much dead on Lemmy for now, it's a chicken and egg thing.

It doesn't help that because we don't really have good algorithms, my feed is dominated by generalist topics, memes, news and tech stuff. So even if I subscribe to smaller communities, if I don't intentionally go visit them they're never in my feed.

We need to better surface posts from smaller communities by having a weighted algorithm so that your feed is a mix of big and small communities.

This was actually mentioned in an issue on the github. I can't quite remember whether it was turned down or just inactive. I totally agree. If we're going to compete with big social medias then we also need some kind of algorithms. Opt-in/out of course.

Isn't Hot supposed to work like that? When it's not broken, of course.

I feel like some simple algorithm like the ones used in dithering may be used to mix up the feed.

My understanding was that hot was just posts with rapidly increasing upvotes, but it's still not weighed between big and small (could definitely be wrong).

Google's algorithm might actively down-rank Lemmy sites though, as the messages appear duplicated on multiple sites, which is usually a sign of SEO blog spam.

Probably needs a change on Google's side to better recognize federated websites. Not impossible that they will do this, lets see.

As of v0.18.2, Lemmy marks the "original URL" as the canonical URL so search engines know which page is the "real" one. Shouldn't that help?

Maybe? I guess Google would need to actively look for that.

According to their develop pages, they do look for that:

There are a handful of factors that play a role in canonicalization: [...], and rel="canonical" link annotations.

(but Google considers it a hint, so they don't have to honor it)

Also, that change was just for Lemmy. Other Fediverse sites may not do the same, which would lessen the effect. For example, from a quick look at a random federated post on kbin.social, there was no such <link rel="canonical"/> element present in the page source.

Hmm does Lemmy need search engine optimization? I have no idea how seo works these days :/

correct and also back linking on our blogs/medium posts/etc..