I am hoping (probably naively so) that lemmy’s stock of technical answers will continue to grow and eventually become a half decent archive for people to search for potential solutions.
Most are parasitic (GPTBot, ImageSift bot, Yandex, etc) but I’ve even blocked Google’s crawler (and its ActivityPub cralwer bot) since it now feeds their LLM models. Most of my content can be found anyway because instances it federated to don’t block those, but the bandwidth and processing savings are what I’m in it for.
I’ve seen some when I appended “Lemmy” just like “Reddit”. But it relies on lemmy being in the domain name.
Also I assume even when people click on those results, they don’t get ranked much higher because it’s so many different domains while reddit is just one.
I’m inclined to think due to the nature of the platform, contents are constantly duplicated to the eyes of search engines, which hurts authoritativeness of each instance thereby hurts ranking.
The problem with that is, lemmy.world is only one of many different instances. Too bad there isn’t a way to add a modifier that searches the entire fediverse.
from the top of my head, that won’t include lemm.ee, sopuli, beehaw, szmer.info, slrpnk.net, sh.itjust.works, or other threadiverse instances like kbin/mbin.
The few times I have bothered to ask technical questions I mostly get one of the following:
Ideological ranting. “The problem is you aren’t running arch linux in that corporate environment with proprietary hardware you need to interface with”
Complete refusal to read the question. “I totally didn’t read that you said Foo was not viable for reasons XYZ but you should use Foo”
Complete nonsense
Reddit has a lot of that too but ALSO has the institutional knowledge of people who actually care enough to answer. Similar to stack overflow.
I try to help where I can but this is an enthusiast “site”. So you have all the people who suggest all the crap they heard on linus tech tips rather than “Okay, for my day job we use X but no sane person should use that at home. Look into Y”.
That said: I have said it before and I’ll say it again. The age of the online message board for tech support is long gone. Because the super useful results might be talking about a bug from five years ago rather than a bug from today. The answer really is ephemeral discord servers.
I am hoping (probably naively so) that lemmy’s stock of technical answers will continue to grow and eventually become a half decent archive for people to search for potential solutions.
tbh I’ve never seen a Lemmy link when searching for stuff. Is it too small to show up? Or do search engines not index Lemmy instances?
A lot of Fediverse admins are just normal people like you and me with a budget, and disallowing bots and spiders helps save bandwidth, and the budget.
Yep. I block all bots to my instance.
Most are parasitic (GPTBot, ImageSift bot, Yandex, etc) but I’ve even blocked Google’s crawler (and its ActivityPub cralwer bot) since it now feeds their LLM models. Most of my content can be found anyway because instances it federated to don’t block those, but the bandwidth and processing savings are what I’m in it for.
One of the major problems with Lemmy is that many posts get deleted and that nukes the comment section (which is where most of the answers will be).
I wish Lemmy deleted posts closer to how Reddit deletes posts - the post content should be deleted, but leave the comments alone.
Searx will show Lemmy results, at least on some Searx instances.
I’ve seen some when I appended “Lemmy” just like “Reddit”. But it relies on lemmy being in the domain name.
Also I assume even when people click on those results, they don’t get ranked much higher because it’s so many different domains while reddit is just one.
I’m inclined to think due to the nature of the platform, contents are constantly duplicated to the eyes of search engines, which hurts authoritativeness of each instance thereby hurts ranking.
You can always add “site:lemmy.world” to your search (remove the quotes). I commonly do that, as well as the same for reddit or stack overflow.
The problem with that is, lemmy.world is only one of many different instances. Too bad there isn’t a way to add a modifier that searches the entire fediverse.
yea i’ve been doing “inurl:lemmy” for that reason
from the top of my head, that won’t include lemm.ee, sopuli, beehaw, szmer.info, slrpnk.net, sh.itjust.works, or other threadiverse instances like kbin/mbin.
Highly doubtful.
The few times I have bothered to ask technical questions I mostly get one of the following:
Reddit has a lot of that too but ALSO has the institutional knowledge of people who actually care enough to answer. Similar to stack overflow.
I try to help where I can but this is an enthusiast “site”. So you have all the people who suggest all the crap they heard on linus tech tips rather than “Okay, for my day job we use X but no sane person should use that at home. Look into Y”.
That said: I have said it before and I’ll say it again. The age of the online message board for tech support is long gone. Because the super useful results might be talking about a bug from five years ago rather than a bug from today. The answer really is ephemeral discord servers.