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.
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.
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! 😋
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
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.
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.
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 the results advertisers want.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
fediverse bringing back bulletin boards and forums would be a great thing.
the internet became a worse place when we lost bulletin boards and forums and got reddit and ai.
I think about Reddit-style platforms being the centralized bulletin boards and forums of these days, and Lemmy is closest we have to a DIY kind of thing which is controlled by the community.
Back in the day only a sufficiently tech savvy person could set up and run a forum software. Now everyone can do it, and with the Fediverse it’s all nicely interconnected, interoperable and truly free and open.
In general the Fediverse is the best shot we got right now to get back to the non-corporate Internet of my childhood and youth, I really hope it will succeed. And succeeding does not mean that it must grow and outcompete the commercial offerings, I think success is if enough motivated and interesting people join and participate. Quality > quantity.
100% agree and I would like to add on to it that it’s worth just posting information, too.
Did you run into a weird error with your Linux install and have a difficult, yet interesting time troubleshooting it? Post the solution! Even if it doesn’t directly address someone else’s problem, often finding pieces of an issue and correlating them with a bigger problem can help.
I don’t run a personal blog and downvotes mean literally nothing here, so have at it!
I went cold turkey on Reddit when they stopped API access and it was rough in the beginning, but I get ever so slightly hints of the old internet here on Lemmy. It’s raw, but it’s fresh and it’s ours. I love it.
