Part of the utility of Reddit to me was the ability to append “Reddit” to searches and be served relevant threads to my search query since Reddit was one of the last places to get information from real people. This has proven to be invaluable in troubleshooting. Is this possible with Lemmy or the greater Fediverse? As we pick up more users and content, it’s my hope I could do the same with Lemmy.
Or is it more like Discord where information isn’t indexed by search engines? One thing I’ve always despised about Discord is the inability to find information if you don’t belong to the communities that produce it and I’m hoping that’s not the case here.
Hopefully this isn’t too silly of a question I’m still trying to wrap my head around how all this works.
Form a technical standpoint lemmy, kbin and co are just as searchable as reddit. Google and co can index them, because everything can be accessed and interpreted using normal web technologies (http, HTML, CSS, …) without needing a login or an invitation to a server and everything is discoverable via links. Perfect for search engines. How good the search results on Google and co are depends on how often and how thorough the search sites will crawl the fediverse. This in turn depends on how important the fediverse sites are deemed by the search engines. This depends on how often they are linked from from the rest of the web and on the amount and qualiry of content and tons of other factors.
I would imagine once everything is federated, we’ll be getting a lot of duplicate results on Google. “How do I do X?” will return the same post across all federated instances unless Google figures out that it’s all the same post and only retrieves a single copy of it.
There’s already a lot of duplicate content on the web. Search engines already have a system to rank duplicate results and not respond with only identical answers. I’m pretty sure this won’t be a big problem. And if it turns out to be a problem, they’ll adjust their algorithms 🙂