One thing Reddit dominates on is search results. I’m looking things up and seeing so many links to reddit, which I guess is going to help keep that place relevant (unless those subreddits stay dark).
I wondered how Lemmy and this fed thingy stuff all works for that? With more posts can we expect to see people arriving through search results?
There’s a lot of things that factor into the answer, but I think overall it’s gonna be pretty random. Some instances are on domains without “Lemmy” in the name, some don’t include “Lemmy” in the site name configuration, and in the case of some like my own instance, I set the
X-Robots-Tagresponse header such that search engines that properly honor the header won’t crawl or index content on my instance. I’ve actually taken things a step further with mine and put all public paths except for the API endpoints behind authentication (so that Lemmy clients and federation still work with it), so you can’t browse my instance content without going through a proper client for extra privacy. But that goes off-topic.Reddit was centralized so could be optimized for SEO. Lemmy instances are individually run with different configuration at the infrastructure level and the application configuration level, which if most people leave things fairly vanilla, should result in pretty good discovery of Lemmy content across most of these kinds of instances, but I would think most people technical enough to host their own instances would have deviated from defaults and (hopefully) implemented some hardening, which would likely mess with SEO.
So yeah, expect it to be pretty random, but not necessarily unworkable.
Easily the best answer here, I think the people who think it will work “just like Reddit” are unfamiliar with federation still, and aren’t used to thinking things through in those terms.
Not to mention that Google results in general have been pretty trash for a couple years now. I don’t expect fediverse content to be prominent for some time unless there is a dedicated service that indexes everything.
I mean why couldn’t there be a dedicated service that indexes everything? Whoever makes it and gets it working in a user friendly manner is going to have a significant level of control on the content that is shown in the results. If you don’t want it, it isn’t indexed. I don’t have to stretch the imagination to think of parties that have good reason to want to be first to do that across Activity Pub as a whole. Mastodon is already a big frontrunner in that regard.