This might be a real stupid question but why is discover updating to a lower version? Is there any place I can read up why this is the case?

P.S.: Yes, I could have absolutely google this but lemmy is about more than just shitposts and memes imo. Asking some rather noobish questions will make us appear on google btw.

  • silly goose meekah
    7•9 months ago

    edit: turns out I’m wrong. google does index lemmy pages. it’s just not easy to find them through google

    I dont think its possible to find any lemmy posts through Google

    • FQQDEnglish
      8•9 months ago

      Honestly a shame. R*ddit is full of helpful information, as is Lemmy, but the latter is not indexed.

      • DeebsterEnglish
        10•9 months ago

        I just tried searching “element lemmy” and got the article Lemmy: Fans call for periodic table element to be named after Motörhead frontman

        Whereas “element reddit” gives /r/elementchat/

        Lemmy is indexed on Google as using the site: operator will show, e.g. “rust site:programming.dev” gives sensible results, but there’s not a way to search across Lemmy. Well, not with Google anyway (Kagi has a Fediverse lens that works fairly well).

        • gilaEnglish
          6•9 months ago

          I couldn’t find it in my comment history, but I saw a thread months ago where someone was lamenting migrating from reddit where they used to just google “episode ### discussion” for the show they’re watching and would find a corresponding reddit thread, but the same thing wasn’t working for them with Lemmy. Someone else pointed out that it might be because Google personalises some of the search results now, so I tried their example query and the top link was to the post I was commenting on. It had already indexed to the most relevant result about an hour after the original post

      • no banana
        2•9 months ago

        Google has said that Lemmy will be indexed when it’s searched for enough.

    • hauiOP
      5•9 months ago

      Nah, we already are on google but it depends on a lot of factors. A lemmy frontend is just another webpage so google will crawl it if you allow it. So if an instance disallows it specifically or has incorrect/unfamiliar sitemap it might not work.

      • silly goose meekah
        3•9 months ago

        hmm, maybe that’s the case for lemmy.world. I wasn’t able to find anything from my comment or post history, even though I copied it exactly into the search.

        edit: just had the idea to put quotation marks around the thing I copied to search for that exact string, and now I found it. Yeah, it really just seems like lemmy pages are not very popular results so google pushes them all the way to the bottom.

        • hauiOP
          2•9 months ago

          Exactly. The reason is that google favors pages that play the algorithm instead of actual content. That and popularity.

        • Chewy
          2•9 months ago

          The major difference between lemmy and reddit is that there’s many instances for search engines to crawl, compared to a single reddit.com. They likely treat each instance seperately, which leads to a lot of duplicate content and most of lemmy isn’t search engine optimized.

          Sadly I don’t see a better way to do it than for search engines to be optimized for this kind of federated platforms. It’s not obvious from the outside which is the preferred instance to show to a user.

          I’ve had some luck finding content on lemmy by forcing a specific instance using site:lemmy.instance.domain, but it depends on the search engine whether it’s respected.