On the future of Lemmy vs reddit

fresh@sh.itjust.works to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 658 points –

Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:

  1. I wouldn't worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)

  2. Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn't fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren't yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.

  3. Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit's leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.

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One problem I see:

You can google site:reddit.com whatever But if you google site:lemmy.world whatever then you're losing a significant amount of results. To get good results, you need to know which Lemmy instances is likely to have your answer, and with communities duplicated over different servers, that can be tough.

In the end I find I prefer this federation model, although I'm not sure although I'm a bit concerned about funding it if it scales up to the size of Reddit (same with Mastodon vs twitter).

Google should be finding searches with "lemmy" keyword, but it isn't at the moment.

Lemmy needs some SEO people.

I don't think lack of SEO is the issue. There's just not enough content and brand/domain authority to get results from here high in SERPS.

There might be something fediverse related that would affect performance in search, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about this setup to speak to it.

I think it's just lack of content, general awareness/interest, and longevity that's keeping Lemmy low in search

Lemmy contents are replicated by federated servers, so you might find what you want by using site:lemmy.world or other big instances because they might also has replicated contents from other smaller instances.

This has more to do with how bad Google has gotten, such that you're forced to add restrictions like Reddit to get rid of SEO sites and get useful answers. A proper working search engine would show these (and any that are found in Lemmy) high up by default.

Ideally it would be popular enough that you wouldn't need the site modifier. Google would see that Lemmy has the most seen and perpetuated answer just like it sometimes does with Reddit now, whatever the instance.

In the eyes of a search engine, yes.

But once a site is popular enough for traffic and engagement to influence it's position in search, it's def going to be popular enough for bots, trolls, bad faith actors, grifters, etc.

People still often out the site modifier on just to prevent google from barfing up a bunch of crap they don't care about, even if they know that Reddit results will be near the top.

Welcome to the old Internet. Decentralization is good in a way, people will have to try harder instead of having everything spoon fed to them by Google.

I'm not personally a fan of that brand of elitist gatekeeping. Having it be harder to keep out the plebs is not a look I think we wanna get behind.

Decentralization is important, but the goal isn't to keep people out.

I guess I didn't exactly mean it as elitist gatekeeping, I see it more like people are being abandoned by major websites and this is the result.