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.
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I ask chatgpt first. It usually gives me decent ideas to test out.
knowledge that Reddit has and will always have
I deleted all of my comments and posts from reddit.
Deleting them only deletes them visibily. They don’t provide Reddit value for customers, but they’re still in the system somewhere in backups or in a DB, etc.
But still, I’m saying, having conversations. Start talking more here. Ask and answer, find others with similar interests. Let’s dog food this Fediverse!
Fully agree! I just learned about https://fedi-search.com/. I’m going to start using it.
Hmm, this sounds like a really cool idea, but it doesn’t seem to do what I thought it would. For example, I went to https://fedi-search.com/ and searched for “stop internet searching” expecting to find this very thread, but alas, no dice.
Oh hell no. Lemmy is an extremely specific filter bubble and absolutely not suitable to replace even the worst search engine.
Agreed. About the only thing I would search Lemmy for is obnoxious Linux snobbery. That, they have on lock.
I’m not saying LEMMY specifically. I’m on Piefed Social. I’m saying ANYWHERE on the Fediverse. Find your platform, build your platform.
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Yeah we need to pivot to being more open. But not even just Lemmy. Post anywhere. Anyone can build anything. The Fediverse isn’t Lemmy. I posted on Piefed.social. :-)
Using a search engine and adding “Lemmy” will, given there is info of course, work similar to adding reddit before.
it’d be nice if you could do a site:reddit.com kinda thing for lemmy, maybe there could be a filter added in searxng or something
Kagi has a lens that only searches the Fediverse.
I’d like to see that happen. Search indexes will have to keep track of the fact, for instance, jlai.lu or infosec.pub are Lemmy instances despite the fact that they might not have “Lemmy” in the url, or even the page title.
It can be done of course, but it’s not like with reddit.com, where anything at that domain is automatically associated with the keyword “Reddit.”
Really solid points that really resonate with me, but are we sure lemmy is the right platform for this? And if so, would we need a separate homeserver with these goals in mind?
I feel like there is monumental opportunity for something to rise up through the ashes of reddit/stack overflow and the ilk that are gettinng AI churned atm. These are things I’ve been reflecting on for weeks and have not found many answers, but if anyone finds the answers please guide/inform me
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Why not share it here? WHy not free the information? Someone could delete their Reddit post or Google could change their algorithm again tomorrow to suit their own needs. We’re currently accepting the old system that’s showing it can’t be trusted. I say free the information. I might be naive though, but I have to try at least.
You need to remember first of all what sites like reddit, digg, and now Lemmy actually are. They are link aggregators. The content is anything and every thing. Just link to it. It’s that simple. And if you feel it is in a place that might get removed, screenshot it, archive.org it, copy into an online Google Doc, and post that. There’s no reason we need 500 identical “How do I do X?” posts just to fill content. Do you want 500 posts clogging your feed about how to fix the same printer issue over and over?
I don’t want 500, but if I had a choice between finding it on the Fediverse or Reddit, I’d prefer the Fediverse personally.
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Fediverse to replace stackoverflow would be something I am interested in.
Same here, it’d have to be something AI-hardened, though, still.
Fedi-Overflow?
Stackiverse?
Why isn’t 11 pronounced ‘Onety One’?
Still not nearly as annoying as the French refusal to just say huitante or nonante. “93” is “Quadrupletwenty-thirteen?” Êtes-vous foutant défoncé??
Know your meme guy pointing
Online pregnancy test
Probably a similar reason 22 isn’t pronounced ‘Twoty Two’
It’s a hangover from earlier base 12 counting systems in which things like eggs would be counted in dozens.
You need 12 unique symbols in a base 12 system.
Thirteen through nineteen come from a different language source than eleven and twelve.
That makes enough sense.
Now to figure out why my language (Portuguese) has unique names going up to 15 instead of 10 or 12.
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 what an advertiser wants.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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! 😋
finally, a recipe with a unique killer flavor
New game:
“AI or Putin? You decide!”
I think it shouldn’t be a competition but possibly something with added value. Possibly in the form of structure, ie something that doesn’t create hundreds of same/similar questions but constantly updates the best answers closest to the existing date. (Alphabetically searchable hashtags, etc…, build it communally, ie #NoStupidQuestions , how to best build a free information platform?).
Oh yeah, not a competition really, just post anything and on any Fediverse platform. We need to dog food the Fediverse. Let’s stop taking the easy way. Sure, find an answer if you like, but come back here tondhare with all of us. We need to build our own library of Alexandria.
Roo roo roo!
your local library is also a great option
I’ll never downplay a library. They’re wonderful. But I’m talking more about how we make the Fediverse more and more valuable. Yes go to the library and then share what you find on the Fediverse.
For most things is much quicker to just use the Internet
What’s quicker: searching bad info sources online or searching better info sources at the library?
Also OP didn’t say it had to be quick
I’d be curious if schools still teach kids how to look things up in books, or if writing reports is now a thing they ask chatgpt to do
Anecdotally, from teachers I know, they use chatgpt.
But libraries are not just print books! They have digital collections and online materials too.
Wikipedia is pretty reliable. It’s not perfect but for most things it does the job, and is up to date.
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
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.
What’s going on with lemmy.world?
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
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.
Power mod problems
Centralization issue. However, it can never be as bad as Reddit.
Transphobes iirc
Is there a way to encourage people to post more? Because the main problem seems to be getting actual posts, not replies to them.
For example “nostupidquestions” only has a few questions a day, but there are 40k subscribers and 1500 people or so checking in every day. It has 4.2k posts and 170k comments.
“asklemmy” has more posts, fewers subscribers, and over 2k a day check in. 6k posts and 317k comments.
This is what I’m getting at. We can only control ourselves, so let’s be tenacious in posting more here. Again it doesn’t have to be a technical question. It could just be “hey I had this issue I fixed it withblah”. Whatever you’re passionate in.
This is a habit that prevalent everywhere, even on reddit. Only 20 or even 10 % of people produce content and rest just watch/consume. If we can have that kind of split on lemmy, it would be fine.
Indeed, the vast majority on any social media platform does not engage. And when they do it’s mostly just liking content and not even replying. You see it on lemmy as well, with news articles often having few comments. And when they do it’s one or two top comments and a bunch of replies.
Over the years the only thing I can imagine is to add another anonymizing layer, where people can send in questions and the “best ones” are posted by a general/bot account. But that is something people much smarter than me have tried to figure out for years, so I have no idea how it would be implemented.
