Searx works for some things
Kagi indexes Lemmy.
I think Lemmy does set the canonical URLs correctly, always linking to the origin instance as canonical so it should see it as multiple ways to get to the same content.
Ultimately Google should figure it out if done correctly. But the problem remains that the userbase is tiny compared to Reddit, and mostly focused on the same relatively niche topics in the first place so it’s just not gonna rank very high unless you search for Linux stuff.
Lemmy has little links (like these: ) that connect every comment and post to their source in a user-friendly method. That makes a comment thread look similar to a link farm. Lemmy isn’t alone in this, other Fediverse tools do the same.
Yeah, and that’s what the canonical tags address: “hey I’m just a copy, my original location is Y”. It’s properly attributing the source of the data and should make search engines not mark it as duplicate content as a result. There’s also tags to mark links as nofollow for indexing that should help with not looking like link farms either.
That should also mean only local content will count as content so that brings its own set of problems where small instances will never rank along the bigger ones.
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Have informative answers here
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Have people specifically using
site:lemmy.cain their queries.
You’d have to attract users with useful knowledge. The site is filled with posts being only a link and 0 comments. The domain will be pushed down just by the low total score it will get. It took Reddit perhaps 10 years to get to the top of ranks, and that was with great content
