Hi all! I used to be a daily r/selfhosted lurker and a bit active user. Since the Reddit saga I thought that r/selfhosted would be one of the first and bigger community to move to Lemmy due to the IT knowledge of all of their users and the sensitivity about self host/privacy/open source, but I see that not only the community is still all there, but it’s rising. :( That really makes me sad. How can we convince the mods there to move people here? Is it allowed to talk about Lemmy on Reddit or do we risk of being banned?
Google’s algorithm might actively down-rank Lemmy sites though, as the messages appear duplicated on multiple sites, which is usually a sign of SEO blog spam.
Probably needs a change on Google’s side to better recognize federated websites. Not impossible that they will do this, lets see.
As of v0.18.2, Lemmy marks the “original URL” as the canonical URL so search engines know which page is the “real” one. Shouldn’t that help?
Maybe? I guess Google would need to actively look for that.
According to their develop pages, they do look for that:
(but Google considers it a hint, so they don’t have to honor it)
Also, that change was just for Lemmy. Other Fediverse sites may not do the same, which would lessen the effect. For example, from a quick look at a random federated post on kbin.social, there was no such
<link rel="canonical"/>element present in the page source.Good to know. Might be worth making an issue report on kbin for that: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core
Someone already made one 3 hours ago. Though apparently it won’t help by itself, since their
robots.txtdisallows indexing anyway (and that same issue also requests that to be adjusted).