this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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I am hoping (probably naively so) that lemmy's stock of technical answers will continue to grow and eventually become a half decent archive for people to search for potential solutions.
Drop a link to a few places people ask tech questions and I will do my part to contribute
This might be a hot take, but I hope that we as a platform are toxic enough to advertisers so that big tech's enshittification and advertising never becomes a problem.
Twitter still has advertisers.
As I understand it, Lemmy, being FOSS, is pretty immune to this since there are no big tech shareholders to appease. Lemmy is susceptible to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) via something like Threads, however.
Really for technical answers things should be on a forum. Troubleshooting a linux distro, post on the distro's forums. Troubleshooting a piece of software, make an issue on its codeberg/github/gitlab/etc. It makes sense that if you're having an issue with a specific thing you ask for help on a forum dedicated to that thing. I don't think it's a positive that things are becoming centralised onto generalised social media, even for more decentralised federated social media like Lemmy. It just makes support for a given piece of software more spread out and harder to find.
The most annoying thing with that is that you need an account for every little forum that you want to post in. But you are still right.
Yeah but we need non technical stuff too which i what i hate about the ui and stuff mot trying to be made simpler for non tech people to start using lemmy. I want doctors, lawyers, and casual people asking questions about everyday items and stuff so i can search “best sleep mask lemmy” or any product category and find good discussions. Would also help if lemmy.com was an instance instead of just redirecting to lemm.ee
I think we have to contribute our hours of UX assistance to see changes there. The brilliant engineers who donate their time probably both focus on working features first and specialize more in technical problem-solving than visual design.
Voyager is quite lovely btw!
Problem is that we'll probably need a dedicated search engine for that. As answers are spread in lots of instances, some of them without "lemmy" in the name, I assume.
Seems like a solvable problem though. We have a list of federated servers inately built into activitypub, right? Just need to tag results from those servers as being linked to a "lemmy" keyword search.
I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it, but all the pieces are there, just need search engines to be smart about how they index. Since there are a couple of federation based models that would be good to index, not just lemmy, it would probably behoove them to figure it out.
tbh I've never seen a Lemmy link when searching for stuff. Is it too small to show up? Or do search engines not index Lemmy instances?
Twice I have come across links to lemmy, definitely not the norm though.
You could always add "site:lemmy.world" to your search (remove the quotes). I commonly do that, as well as the same for reddit or stack overflow.
The problem with that is, lemmy.world is only one of many different instances. Too bad there isn't a way to add a modifier that searches the entire fediverse.
Most of the originalish content on lemmy are linux related stuff, memes and porn. The latter 2 are mostly image/video based, so you don't search for that very frequently and easily. I can see that in the future it will become a very relevant source of info in linux admin and user circles.
I go back to r*ddit sometimes for some local content which is non existent on lemmy. I see that the tech related subs are mostly dead there, or at least only shadows of their former selfs. E.g. go to r/linux, sort by top all time. In the first 100 results you will barely find anything posted after the exodus.
Yeah, the notion that Lemmy is a Reddit replacement is misguided. It definitely doesn't have the same Q&A balance Reddit does. It feels a lot more like 90s and early 2000s forums than the large-scale self-service link and customer service churn Reddit encourages.
Which I'm all for. I was never a Reddit guy and I do like it here. But in terms of how bad it is now that Reddit is not happy to host most of the actually useful online content for free... well, that's a different conversation.
Yeah I mostly go back for r/BestofRedditorUpdates to get my trash drama fix and r/nursing to commiserate with my people. I've tried bringing in more hcw communities but sometimes its tiring to be the first of a few to move over. It elicits some pretty strong feelings of isolation.
I've seen it a couple of times when searching on DDG.
One of the major problems with Lemmy is that many posts get deleted and that nukes the comment section (which is where most of the answers will be).
I wish Lemmy deleted posts closer to how Reddit deletes posts - the post content should be deleted, but leave the comments alone.
Searx will show Lemmy results, at least on some Searx instances.
A lot of Fediverse admins are just normal people like you and me with a budget, and disallowing bots and spiders helps save bandwidth, and the budget.
Really? I thought they were free and didn’t affect bandwidth.
Any data transit costs money. Both in the data transit itself and in the increased server resources to respond to the web queries in the first place.
bots take resources to serve just like any regular user
They usually only index text though
Could it be possible to have one major global instance that aggregates everything so it can be indexed by search engines? Would that work? Or do I not fully understand how federation works?
Lemmy search already is quite excellent... at least here on lemm.ee, we don't have many communities but tons of users subscribed to probably about everything on the lemmyverse so the servers have it all.
It might be interesting to team up with something like YaCy: Instances could operate as YaCy peers for everything they have. That is, integrate a p2p search protocol into ActivityPub itself so that also smaller instances can find everything. Ordinary YaCy instances, doing mostly web crawling, can in turn use posts here as interesting starting points.
That would defeat the purpose of federation.
It becomes a central choke point of moderation. Who gets to decide what instances are part of global and which ones aren’t. Because a free for all isn’t going to end well. And then you’re back at Reddit.
Right, but having a centralised search index thingy is better than none at all. Maybe there could be something where it's a joint effort from admins from many of the biggest servers, idk if that would work.
I wonder if you could have an instance federated to every other instance just for archived purposes, to save the data on every other instance's post and comment. Because copies of posts and comments are saved to federated instances, too, right? Or do I understand the tech wrong?
So it could have an admin team but no users, to prevent people worried about spammers and bots joining that instance to get around defederation rules. Maybe it just has a bot that crawls Lemmy, looking for instances to federate to. Could that work?
You’re describing Meta’s plan but yes that could work.
Godamnit Meta... Lol
I just wish lemmy search itself wasn't broken..
I was worrying about precisely this. I’d be ok with blocking search engines if there was a better way of searching but AFAICT there isn’t federated search of any kind?
All a spider needs is an instance to download everything.
I’m inclined to think due to the nature of the platform, contents are constantly duplicated to the eyes of search engines, which hurts authoritativeness of each instance thereby hurts ranking.
Highly doubtful.
The few times I have bothered to ask technical questions I mostly get one of the following:
Reddit has a lot of that too but ALSO has the institutional knowledge of people who actually care enough to answer. Similar to stack overflow.
I try to help where I can but this is an enthusiast "site". So you have all the people who suggest all the crap they heard on linus tech tips rather than "Okay, for my day job we use X but no sane person should use that at home. Look into Y".
That said: I have said it before and I'll say it again. The age of the online message board for tech support is long gone. Because the super useful results might be talking about a bug from five years ago rather than a bug from today. The answer really is ephemeral discord servers.
Ephemeral discord servers are awful because they don't scale and they can only ever help the lowest common denominator of questions/issues. We need something else, but it has yet to present itself as a solution.
I'm sure you've had bad experiences but they actually scale as well as any forum ever did and are great because the general vibe is not "This was asked ten years ago, go figure out some search terms" and more actually responding to and helping people.
The key is to have a moderated support channel.