I was just thinking about this, when I’m facing an issue, the first thing I do is go to a search engine and usually there’s a Reddit post. But I don’t want to ask there. And the only way we’re going to build up the info for folks to find us and come here is for us to just start asking here. On the Fediverse. We need to build up that mountain of knowledge that Reddit has and will always have. So we should be championing ANYONE asking questions here. Even if we think it’s obvious and we think you can just Google it. There was a time where you literally couldn’t just Google it. That was built over time. We need to build that here. So start asking your questions here! Find the answers and then post your answer to your own question. Or let someone do it for you. We need to build the knowledge here to be found. It’s not just about people looking for alternatives. We need our knowledge to be more valuable than their knowledge.
I have been trying to do that since I came here because you are precisely right google has become at best broken at worst an agent actively trying to manipulate you and reddit is entirely untrustable, keep doing what you are doing and don’t forget to have fun while you are doing the right thing!
Thank you so much! It’s nice to know others agree. I’ve been so concerned with all of this, thinking I’m the only one thinking this, but I’m not. We’re ALL thinking this. And I’ve been having an absolute BLAST. Not just for myself, but doing my Fireside Fedi show and even working towards setting up my nonprofit BT Free. We’ll see where it all goes. Maybe it just us, but at least we have each other. :-) Thank you for the kind words of support. <3
Good idea, I try to do it, but niche stuff is rough here, if you are a part of an active discord, suggest making and hosting a lemmy community to them, I’m gonna try to get some 3d discords to post more art here.
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Every little bit counts.
Kagi search has a function to specifically search the fediverse.
OH! LOVE THIS! Thank you KAGI!
I try to ask questions here instead of reddit in the hopes that lemmy will pop up in google for someone.
And I think that’s what we should do. Or even ask the question, search it on Google, and answer your own post! :-) We need to foster the Fediverse by existing in the Fediverse and stop depending on Big Tech or using them to help build OUR internet. :-)
This is what I do when I want to search Lemmy. I put Lemmy: “search for this” into the search box and see what comes up. It works better than Lemmy’s internal search function a lot of the time.
I personally think that the main problem is bad search optimization. There quite a lot of good answers on Fediverse (Lemmy) but it is nearly impossible to find them via Google or any other regular search engine. And making things worse since Lemmy is Federated it is not easy to implement correct indexing for it. So it makes a lot of questions(Should each instance index only local posts to prevent duplicated search results? What about small instances? Or use some central instance like Lemmy.World? What about different frontends for same instance like Photon or Alexandrite?).
Suppose I wanted to discuss, say, typewriter repair. How could I find the appropriate community? How do I avoid having my questions deleted because they are “off topic”? How do I find posts/comments/answers related to my interests?
One of my biggest gripes about the fediverse (and honestly any online community) is people making increasingly niche places to discuss things before there is a need to split things due to size. I’d post that to something like a general hobbies group. I’d also say mods need to be less strict about what is and isn’t on-topic while there isn’t much traffic in their communities.
I’d say having those groups isn’t bad in itself, but they should crosspost posts to and from the small groups.
It would be cool if there was an operator that would force the search into Lemmy content. Are they called bangs? Like starting with !r
Kagi (paid search engine, haven’t tried it myself) has a fediverse forums (lemmy, piefed, mbin) lens.
It also makes it easy to remove reddit from search results entirely.
Oh wow, you’re right!
I wonder how they set that up? DDG has thousands of bangs but not one for Lemmy - probably because it is not at one single URL?
Kagi’s lens are the equivalent of custom feeds for searching (i think, I haven’t used kagi).
But yeah, ddg bangs basically just jump you to a search page on a website.
Thats fucking stupid
Maybe, instead of Reddit and Lemmy and other forums, how about you just host a Wiki? Its gonna take more time, but it will be way better for readability.
Hey thanks! Just a point of advice starting a conversation with “that’s fucking stupid” isn’t exactly seen as useful or helpful information. I’m just attempting to start conversations and help promote the fediverse so that it continues to grow. If you want to offer any helpful advice instead of being negative, that’s be great.
I ask chatgpt first. It usually gives me decent ideas to test out.
E: the downvotes are interesting. I wonder why.
Downvotes are because a lot of folks are against ChatGPT and LLMs. We’re going through MANY information transitions in the last 40 years and yet another holy grail is difficult to swallow. If you want to ask ChatGPT that’s fine, but I’m trying to get folks to foster the Fediverse and make it more welcoming, more valuable, and heck just help people find us. Use the tools you want, absolutely. But we also need to find ways to help promote the Fediverse.
We need to seriously AI proof before that happens or the bots will clean us out and eat all our bandwidth. The only thing keep us safe is we are under the radar.
Instances can close registrations if there are too many bots, and somehow it could be okay. Bots aren’t impossible to fight, the problem is that capitalist platforms support or ignore the issue since for them is somewhat convenient driving engagement… Or whatever ad-revenue system is behind that.
Yeah accounts are needed to post I’m talking just the AIs scraping content and them not respecting robots.txt.
Here’s your cupcake receipe ingredients:
- 1 cup of water
- 1 cup of flour
- 1 egg (tastes better if tariffed)
- 12 fl oz of Polonium
- Access to a window in a tall building
Enjoy! 😋
New game:
“AI or Putin? You decide!”
finally, a recipe with a unique killer flavor
Even if Lemmy grows to a point of being on the radar, theres still no hope for any real IP to lock down for anybody. The whole design is fairly antithetical to being taken over and turned into a cash cow of some kind, despite feeling very much like something centralized in terms of how we interact with it.
I agree with OP, and I think this can even become an even better repository for information than something like Reddit, because it’s more democratized and deters astroturfing or many types of malfeasance by design. Especially as it stands now, early on. Thats why I started a community for billiards. The reddit community for billiards, as well as old forum sites, are great wealths of information that is hard to otherwise find. It would be great to build something like that here over time
You’re right, and it’s infuriating that the AI scrapers are just so lazy/incompetent that they do things like try to scrape every dynamic page of a git repo instead of just cloning it. Similarly, they could just connect over ActivityPub and it wouldn’t have much more overhead than another private instance.
There’s Anubis which uses JavaScript to force browsers to do some work before they can access, but given how unpopular Cloudflare is around here, I imagine there’d be a lot of complaints if it was deployed on every instance.
Kagi has a search lens for Fediverse forums like Lemmy. More content in Lemmy will make that even better
Just to save people a rabbithole.
Kagi is pretty cool. But it’s not free. And for most people who don’t have much disposable income it’s not really a justifiable expense to pay for a search engine.
Of course if one truly can’t afford it, paying for search can seem a luxury.
However I would argue as a counterpoint; If there’s any online service one would consider paying for, it should be search. Search is most literally our “front page to the internet”. It’s our first stop in any quest for information. Even the founders of Google knew early on, that putting adds in search creates a perverse incentive against the best results, favoring instead worse results, so people perform more searches, creating more opportunities to show people adds.
$5 a month isn’t much to know your query will give the results you want, instead of the results advertisers want.
Absolutely. I never imagined I’d pay for search but Kagi is leaps and bounds better than other search engines. I decided to pay when I realized how much I search every day after getting the free trial. Went through 100 searches in four days. If I search that much, paying for an engine that has no ads, uses useful lenses, and lets me block results from sites like Facebook was a no-brainer.
I wish yacy was better. Federated/self hosted search should be awesome.
Would you prefer something limited to searching federated content, or something closer to yacy where it crawls normal websites too?
I can sympathize with not having the money to pay for a search engine when others are free. Aside from the great results, I like the idea of paying for a search engine.
“If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product being sold” is true, and I don’t want to use a search engine that is trying to sell me to advertisers. I want the company’s goals to be aligned with mine as a user. I want them to worry about making me happy as a user, not finding ways to show me ads.
Love this. Yes anywhere on the Fediverse. I wonder if Searxng has a Fediverse search.
YUP! Just spoke on the SearxNG Matrix folks: https://matrix.to/#/#searxng:matrix.org
And you CAN do !bangs for the Fediverse they said. !lemmy or !mastodon for instance. I didn’t know that! I’ll be posting more about this.
Reddit took many years to build that reputation. And earned creepy badges along the way. I’m not saying the fediverse doesn’t need to do it, but let’s not be in a rush. We have technical challenges, and a lemmy.world, and a .ml problem before we’re ready for the big leagues
And being niche is fine for now, email was tiny for decades
What’s going on with lemmy.world?
Transphobes iirc
Depending on who you ask, a lot. Or very little.
For me today, though, it was the large downtime earlier. It’s big by Fediverse standards, microscopic by Reddit standards, and as-is it struggles to keep stable uptime some days.
Hi from piefed.social. we have alternatives to Lemmy world. We can literally go anywhere and talk. So let’s spread out and talk. Takes the load and responsibility off of one instance.
Centralization issue. However, it can never be as bad as Reddit.
It is lemmy essentially. By far most communities, users, and a single point of failure in essence. That makes is quite good for getting it technically correct however, the best kind of correct
Power mod problems
Idk if others remember, but Reddit had a LOT of technical challenges early on. Twitch was down constantly. YouTube was flaky early on. The technical part can be handled by those building the platforms and supporting the Fediverse. What can WE do RIGHT NOW? My thought is communicate, share, talk, empathize, listen, etc.
fediverse bringing back bulletin boards and forums would be a great thing.
the internet became a worse place when we lost bulletin boards and forums and got reddit and ai.
I think about Reddit-style platforms being the centralized bulletin boards and forums of these days, and Lemmy is closest we have to a DIY kind of thing which is controlled by the community.
Back in the day only a sufficiently tech savvy person could set up and run a forum software. Now everyone can do it, and with the Fediverse it’s all nicely interconnected, interoperable and truly free and open.
In general the Fediverse is the best shot we got right now to get back to the non-corporate Internet of my childhood and youth, I really hope it will succeed. And succeeding does not mean that it must grow and outcompete the commercial offerings, I think success is if enough motivated and interesting people join and participate. Quality > quantity.
Let’s DO IT! :-)
100% agree and I would like to add on to it that it’s worth just posting information, too.
Did you run into a weird error with your Linux install and have a difficult, yet interesting time troubleshooting it? Post the solution! Even if it doesn’t directly address someone else’s problem, often finding pieces of an issue and correlating them with a bigger problem can help.
I don’t run a personal blog and downvotes mean literally nothing here, so have at it!
I went cold turkey on Reddit when they stopped API access and it was rough in the beginning, but I get ever so slightly hints of the old internet here on Lemmy. It’s raw, but it’s fresh and it’s ours. I love it.
And if downvotes bother you, that’s okay. There are plenty of instances that don’t show it, say lemmy.blahaj.zone.
Also, on some UI’s you can disable it even on instances that show it.
I’m happy to see people post about something cool they found, like some new software or whatever. Even if everyone else already knows about it and no one interacts, it’s not useless information.
100% this. SHARE anything and everything. Pretend like the internet doesn’t exist and it’s day one. Build it.
Yes, or if you find a solution you can post it here for preservation. I’ve posted some guides and info that i pulled from Reddit onto here because the way things are going, I can’t guarantee that information will still be available in a years time.
Preservation is so MASSIVELY important imo atm. With Internet Archive under fire, Reddit and Twitter closing APIs, Google shutting down fucking everything, we need OUR internet, not theirs and we need to protect that which is precious to us.
Exactly. While Lemmy isn’t exactly like the Internet archive, at least its self hosted so you could preserve anything you want for as long as you wanted on here
Agreed. And even if 1 instance goes down, if another instance is following, it’s still there. It’s potentially the strongest off site backup ever.
