This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @[email protected] 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

  • DeebsterEnglish
    11•1 year ago

    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.

    • @duckingtonEnglish
      2•1 year 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.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      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?

      • DeebsterEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•1 year ago

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