I didn’t discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.

And that’s OK. The Internet was better before everyone was using it.

Try searching Google for “Saganumenousness”

On Kagi there’s a fediverse lens (basically a filter)

i don’t want lwmmy to take off, i like it rn

Listen, it’s not our job to make Google search result better. They could have easily parsed apub sites like lemmy correctly of they want, but they’re so enshittified there’s low chance of that. But that doesn’t mean we should be trying to fix their shit.

I’d rather Lemmy burn to the ground than become famous, seriously watching AND experiencing twitter, reddit, Facebook, MySpace, my-yearbook, and (does Skype count?). I would like to make Lemmy my forever social media. Only time will tell if it lasts though.

You are assuming the point of this is to be famous rather than non profit niche community driven

I mostly agree with the OP, it would be great if Lemmy had more sources of newbies than just “pissed off redditors”. (I have further reasons for that, but they don’t matter here.) As such I’ll focus on specific tidbits here and there.

The content is indexable (by Google), but your point stands as it sucks. It’s hard to reliably find Lemmy content by it.

Do you - or anyone here - have a good idea on how to solve that? Someone suggested a Lemmy-based engine; it’s tempting but it wouldn’t help if the person doesn’t know about Lemmy already.

Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure

It used to be like this. “Stumbling” upon the site was only a thing later, as it had already enough content to become a source of info.

Lemmy will be indexed less than Reddit, ignoring user counts, because lemmy-ui is client rendered. Googlebot and some others can still index client rendered sites, but others will ignore the content.

good, keep it small and un-fucked with. the more eyes on it, the more in danger its in of either enshittification or being blocked by govs that don’t want open conversation.

Why rely on google which is going down on reliability so quickly.

What we need is a GOOD lemmy based search engine. Which I think is entirely possible with current lemmy implementation.

Lemmy won’t catch on until there are groups of communities you can ban at once. Sports, Linux, German, pervy anime… It’s a very rare user who will put up with the absolute dreck of the initial feed and manually block communities until they have a feed that’s marginally personalized.

Then there’s the fact that any communities that are specific to peoples interests are completely empty.

Even if it’s indexed, there’s no single website to search for so even if I add “Lemmy” to help, it won’t look for content where Lemmy isn’t mentioned.

The mistake that was made was making the decentralization something that affects the front end. If the backend was decentralized and the front end was a single default website with people being able to create alternatives (but everyone being guaranteed access to all the content), that wouldn’t be an issue. We could tell new users “Sign up on Lemmy.com and if you decide you don’t like the UI just choose an alternative and use the same credentials to sign in.” No one would know you’re using a different UI, all content would be searchable by adding site:lemmy.com to your query.

There are MANY reasons that Lemmy won’t replace Reddit…the list is almost endless, with each individual reason not being a hurdle on its own that can’t be solved. However the combined number of problems is just mind blowing.

There is one chief problem that sums up all the little problems quite nicely. It’s the Fediverse culture. It’s somehow a platform that is designed to be open and free, but because of the userbase comes off as a walled garden. If you’re not a programmer, or a linux user, or have techie interests, it’s not the platform for you. And in order to even be comparible to reddit, it has to be a platform for everyone.

As it stands though, Lfmmy is a disjointed, unorganized mess that if you aren’t part of their clique, you’re not welcome. If you say anything bad about linux, or star trek, or github, you get downvoted to hell. Ask me how I know.

Oh, and for the record, linux is ALSO a confusing hot mess for the average person. But until linux developers accept this, and make a linux distro that is as easy to understand as windows, it’s userbase will remain something akin to a rounding error for windows userbase numbers. And I’m saying that as someone who’s remaining on Windows 7, because everything since has been hot garbage.