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.
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 🙂