One of the best things about reddit was looking for answers or other users with the same problem as you, and since Google didn’t really help with that anymore and instead insisted on giving you business results, the best practice was to put your search terms in followed by ‘reddit’ and you’d find your answer.
I don’t know about others but I used to just add “reddit” to each of my searches. Wouldn’t adding “Lemmy” instead do the same thing eventually?
The problem is I don’t know if it would pull instances that don’t contain Lemmy in the name.
As a newcomer, I’ve visited 3 Lemmy sites: Beehaw. Lemmy.world, and a custom instance. I noticed that they each have page footers that contain: Join Lemmy. If the same is true of many Lemmy instances, I can add Lemmy (or, with quotation marks, “Join Lemmy”) in a Google query. — (Note: Top matches might not always be best matches on the originating instance, or sometimes the best matches might be hidden until I click “repeat the search with the omitted results included.” And of course sometimes I won’t get any match because the target hasn’t been indexed by Google.)
Adding “join lemmy” is really smart.
If it became a common enough thing to search for, Google would correct for that and start ranking Lemmy instances higher, regardless of what’s in the name.
Or other federated content on other platforms.
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The issue is google for the last few years has been prioritising businesses and services with really good SEO. And ads.
So in order to find helpful user content I always had to add Reddit to the search query.