LolaCat comments on We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. *Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST*

We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by dessalines@lemmy.ml [M] to c/announcements@lemmy.ml

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This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

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[–] LolaCat@sh.itjust.works 131 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

Any plans for improving SEO? One of Reddit’s biggest strengths was being able to get very relevant results with a simple internet search. In time can you see something similar for Lemmy, even with its decentralized nature? I really you for doing this, thank you for your time!

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml [S] 126 points 3 years ago (5 children)

Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there's anything else needs to be added, we're open to PRs.

Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn't be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I'd rather focus on improving lemmy's search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.

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[–] yay@sh.itjust.works 33 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

Would you please consider having only local post/community/users indexed by search engines? A lemmy.ml user complained that their username is first result on Google with lemmynsfw.com domain name. Also implementing this would decrease chance of duplicate content.

It can resolved with a simple noindex meta tag.

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml [S] 36 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I'd be open to a PR for that, sure.

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[–] yay@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

I hate Inferno (specifically class components) but I'll check what I can do 🙏

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml [S] 16 points 3 years ago

I do too now (I created lemmy-ui when react was king), which is why the new UI will be written in leptos, using signal-based reactivity, and functional components.

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[–] Deebster@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

edit: This start bit is wrong; Lemmy does SSR so Javascript-free/spiders should see at least some comments.

~~Lemmy is currently pretty terrible at SEO, in large part because the comments don't load until the JS has run.~~

This isn't just a problem for search engines, it affect things like archive.org and offline reading. Earlier today I loaded a page from an instance that had dropped offline - while they had Cloudflare Always Online enabled, the page loaded without comments so it was almost useless.

I think it's a mistake to consider all the SEO-related concerns as irrelevant just because you don't care about Google, etc. Most of the things necessary for good SEO are just good practices, with benefits for all users, especially in the areas of accessibility and third-party tools.

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[–] poplargrove@reddthat.com 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

Lemmy-ui uses isomorphic rendering so comments do come loaded (just not all of them) on the first page you visit, no javascript needed. Did you mean it should serve all comments?

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[–] Deebster@lemmy.ml 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

Hmm, I've just tested an that does seem to be the case, at least as far back as 0.17.4. Do you know when this was added? Or if it's something that can be disabled?

Looking into Cloudflare Always Online, it uses the Internet Archive's backup instead of keeping on itself which could explain me seeing zero comments (i.e. IA scraped the page after posting but before any comments). I can't figure out which page in my history was the post in question, so I can't be sure.

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[–] poplargrove@reddthat.com 2 points 3 years ago

Sadly I dont know when it was added or if it can be turned off, Im not very familiar with it.

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[–] duckington@lemmy.world 2 points 3 years ago

Seconding this. In addition to the accessibility, etc benefits, just think about the sheer amount of traffic/users that came from people googling a completely unrelated topic and having reddit pop up. Those are users that might not have otherwise found the platform.

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[–] FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 years ago

Fair enough. I'm currently focused on creating my own Lemmy web UI, but later I might have room to submit some SEO-related PRs. While I'm not yet sure what needs to be done, instance owners can get tailored recommendations from Google. I have a hunch that Lemmy is currently being penalized for duplicate content, which we might be able to mitigate by adding `` to federated posts.

I'm fully with you on not wanting to cater to Google. On the other hand, if someone writes a helpful Lemmy post, I would like people who don't know Lemmy to be able to find it.

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[–] Bucky@816am.ddns.net 3 points 3 years ago

and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for,

This is one of the most true statements I've read in the past years. Internet search is unusable.

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[–] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 1 point 3 years ago

It's also all about to change as soon as Google drops the new generative search feature.

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[–] FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml 72 points 3 years ago

I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy's core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It'll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.

If you're not sure where to start, Google's free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.

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[–] fidodo@lemm.ee 5 points 3 years ago

To a certain extent lemmy is inherently at a disadvantage because of how Google ranks things. Google gives a lot of weight to site trust which works on a per host basis, and lemmy is distributed meaning the trust of the system as a whole is diluted across instances. It's a really stupid system that just helps big sites get bigger. It's made even worse because big blog sites are actually only owned by a small handful of companies and since single companies own many properties that can collude between them to funnel their page ranks between their network of sites.

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