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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Reddit Migration
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You're absolutely right that we have a bit of a terminology issue here, but one slightly advanced and techy thing to understand about the fediverse is that the fediverse itself is the "platform":
Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Calckey, etc., are software projects or processes that are running on some server somewhere, and ActivityPub is the protocol (kind of like a language) that all these processes use (to varying degrees) to speak with each other. As users, we interact with a specific server or service (like beehaw.org or kbin.social) that is running that software and sharing info with other servers through a protocol.
This is totally different to Reddit or Twitter, which are both the names of the service AND (probably, but we don't now) the software that the service is running behind the scenes. Naturally that makes it a bit easier to talk about, because we don't have any access to or knowledge about the software or protocols that they use, and we can just talk about the services.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that Kbin and Lemmy are replacements for Reddit (the software) while servers like kbin.social or beehaw.org are replacements for Reddit.com (the service), except they also talk to each other somewhat seamlessly. I'm logged into the server "kbin.social", which runs a software called "Kbin", which communicates over a protocol called "ActivityPub" to a bunch of users who are on other servers running other software.
In other words, Google searching for "Lemmy" isn't exactly a good metric, not only because Reddit is one of the biggest websites around and Google knows this, but also because "Lemmy" isn't the actual name of the service that we are using right now, just the software. If you tell someone to go over to a specific server (like beehaw.org, kbin.social, etc.) then they'll have a much easier time finding something that they can actually use.
Most of us are guilty of kind of glossing over all this stuff to keep things simple and easy to understand, but there are some layers of nuance to the fediverse here that make this a little bit more complicated than you're making it out to be imo.
Everything you’ve said is correct, however, there is an issue that the “this all just the fediverse” doesn’t address: when I’m looking for niche info about something, I usually add either “reddit” or “site:reddit.com” to the end of a web search, but with the fediverse, it’s kinda hard to replicate that. Adding “lemmy” or “kbin” to the web search wouldn’t exactly yield every possible result on the threadiverse since not every threadiverse instance uses those words in neither the URL nor the website itself. How would you handle that specific issue?
I don't know, and I think that's a fair point...
Of course, part of the reason that Reddit is so easy to find on Google is because it's already a huge and established website with lots of traffic. It's never easy for a new site to compete with established players in terms of search engine results, and I think the bulk of that problem lies with the search engine providers themselves.
The problem we have then is that search engines won't change for the Fediverse. Maybe the SearXNG people could at least add the biggest instances as "preferred" targets in the search results or something. We probably won't have a perfect solution for a while.