Hey folks, was just thinking that one of the major benefits of forums is that it stores and indexes knowledge for the rest of time. I still regularly look up stackoverflow questions written years ago.
Are lemmy instances (such as https://programming.dev) going to be similarly indexed?
If there’s been no thought on how to implement this, I was thinking that meta tags could be used to indicate to search engines that homegrown content (i.e. content that belongs to your own instance) should be indexed while federated content (i.e. content on your instance that was federated from other instances) should remain non-indexed.
That way, searching the title of this post on Google will only lead to a single result on the single instance that owns it.
Thoughts?
Search engines do indeed index Lemmy instances, just as with any other public web site.
For example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aprogramming.dev+humor
You can append (intext:"modlog" & "instances" & "docs" & "code" & "join lemmy") to your search query to search through all Lemmy instances. Works with Google, Startpage, SearX.
People are already working on unified search tool, it’s not really hard as all you need is a list of instances and and a way to index them.
