honestly we should have collectively realized way earlier that putting all the useful, readable, un-touched-by-SEO help content for basically every niche hobby fandom and ideology in the hands of one for-profit entity was not very wisdom-pilled of us
we should have collectively realized way earlier
some people have, but whenever you’d mention it, you’d be met with “lol take the tinfoil hat off”, “but we’re already using [for-profit platform] why would we move when everyone’s here” and “but it’s haaaaaaard”.
Source: https://xkcd.com/743/
The fact that the alt-text directly mentions Diaspora is more than amusing in this context
I’ve said it numerous times over the years, the Internet has been centralizing rapidly and it benefits none of us.
In 2005 you’d wander around, going from peoples’ personal pages to forums to whatever else people linked. In 2015 half of those websites were dead because everyone got their content on reddit anyway.
I agree, but I also have serious concerns about this being the replacement strategy. It could be because of my ignorance of how this all works though. Like many of you, I am new and here because of the reddexodus.
These servers are going to cost money, and for many of them the money will run out. Is there a function to preserve the collective content of an entire server once it goes dark? I know that you can migrate your own account to another server, but what happens to everything Google has indexed at Lemmy.world if the worst happens? Is it all just dead links? What if many of the users do not migrate? Is it just gone?
I am concerned that in the current state we are setting up to burn everything that loses a couple admins or becomes too old to economically host.
I was on a mastodon server and the owner decided it was not worth his money to keep running. He did not inform anyone on the server or allow any account backups and all was lost.
In practice the content is distributed to all the other servers, so people who have been reading it before will still be able to on their own instance, but you’re right the indexed domain is gone and so are the results in Google.
But there is one difference, one instance of lemmy only stores a very small fraction of the content. And it’s much easier to fuck up one reddit compared to fuck up thousands of lemmy instances simultaneously. So if one instance goes down, the rest of the fediverse is still up and running.
These are certainly possibilities! It’s happened elsewhere in the Fediverse… but already we can export most of our data and migrate to a different instance. Getting these base features right is important before enhancing their functionality. Planning for the future is important too. So far I’ve been impressed by Lemmy, though it’s not nearly as portable as Mastodon or Calckey or Pleroma etc. Part of that is that in Lemmy/kbin we don’t follow other users… we subscribe to groups (subs/communities/magazines).
Still, with the nature of ActivityPub, it’s inevitable that migration tools for Reddit-like federated apps will get built quick-like
I think it’s a fair concern. We’ve seen other parts of the fediverse successfully implement crowd sourced funding via patron and similar to keep mastodon servers running and I suspect if Lemmy remains “the place to be” admins will have reasonable success with a similar model. Lemmy is super efficient and can support 100s of users on a single box so I think if 1% of users paid like $5 a month you could probably still support 99% of users “for free”.
I’m sorry, but clearly you have not looked for niche information on Google for a while now. Lots of links end in dead ones, particularly when I am looking for vehicle information on older models.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say, we shouldn’t be concerned because this problem already happened?
A lot niche older vehicle information, if it wasn’t hosted on Reddit, was often on forums funded by enthusiasts, which eventually ran out of money and no longer exist. This is exactly the problem that I’m concerned about. Particularly so if a certain community balloons in popularity and an admin nukes it to keep the server costs under control for the other members.
we can still easily fall into this trap if there isn’t a good way to migrate communities between instances. And even if we could just take /c/technology@beehaw.org and move the whole thing to /c/technology@feddit.de or something, that would still break all the indexers’ links
What we really need is some sort of torrent-like system for this content with something equivalent to magnet links.
Sounds like you’re describing ipfs :D
One thing the FOSS world really needs to get on right now is some form of search engine accessible distributed content archival. We need a way to store useful content from the past in a way that no one individual or group of individuals is capable of deleting it.
I believe archive.org fits the definition
is there a tool that makes searching archive.org reddit (etc) posts easier?
That is the main reason why I’ve been blogging on my own website since 2004 https://paradies.jeena.net/weblog/2004/apr/ersteintrag (and switched to English in 2010 https://jeena.net/posts )
Reddit actions are tragic for the web. I can’t even tell you how many times I searched something and typed Reddit at the end of the query. Not just because Reddit search SUCKS, but mostly because it’s a gold mine of information. Especially for technical stuff.
Your game crash? Reddit. Weird bug on your laptop? Reddit. Looking for a cool app? Reddit. Have a weird question? Reddit.
Reddit saved me countless hours and headache. I felt that yesterday when doing a search about something without even putting Reddit on it, kept bringing up Reddit links. I’d click on it without reading and end up on a locked sub because of the blackout.
It sucks but I hope it’s going to continue. But at the same time, I don’t see Reddit backing down. And even lf they do? I’m not going back. Because how dare you? Like… screw you for even trying to pull that crap on your users.
Try using ChatGPT if you haven’t. Ive used Reddit in the past for a lot of troubleshooting, but ChatGPT is easier to get the answers I’m looking for unless I asked the question myself. But there’s no judgement from ChatGPT lol
Though, take care to factcheck what you get from it; all it really is is just a word predictor, and it can be pretty good at confidently telling you absolute nonsense that sounds right
Am I the only one that’s noticed how reddit has been fucking with web crawlers? They insert newer comments into older posts so the crawlers pick up false results.
A few years back they started injecting a “related posts” box into pages. What that does is multiply the amount of results a crawler will pick up. But all those are false results. There’s only one true search result which is the original comment/post. Some times I find myself sifting though the search engine results to find the actual original post. The rest are completely worthless, off topic, reddit posts littering the search index.
I know all this blackout stuff hurts now. I see it as necessary for the platform to lose its status as the “front page of the internet”. Reddit turned evil a long time ago. It’s long past time it be deposed of.
That explains why the search page quotes a comment that doesn’t exist on the post. That always confused me. It’s insane how dependent on searching with “reddit” appended on the end of the search term I am. I have qualms as to how this’ll bode for search engines if reddit loses interest or goes under.
Had this happen today. Was searching for some programming related stuff and top pages are all inaccessible Reddit posts.
Same. Had some things I needed to look up for my 3D printer and much of the results were inaccessible.
Was a pain.
About 4 people at work Monday discovered the blackouts and learned the reason from following Google results. I’d say that shows the effectiveness of the protest. That’s 4 individuals that I work with personally who wouldn’t have known otherwise about the api problem that now do. I can only imagine how many people are in that same boat.
Same, but it’s just growing pains.
We should start rewriting posts in lemmy with the correct information.
This also highlights the problem with a lot of communities moving to Discord, which inevitably ends up as repositories for critical information, but can’t be indexed by Google. Reddit is still valuable as a problem solving resource, and I hope they fix this API fiasco.
I’m willing to bet the lack of api access going forward will make all reddit posts disappear from crawler results anyways. I’m no expert, but I imagine the crawler is picking up on all of the interconnected references to reddit that are all due to free api access. As soon as those connections disappear, so dies the value to the entire community. It will be just like the garbage results we get from every single source now. This is the path of neo digital feudalism.
API calls are almost always private between the caller and the endpoint (think telegram bots or mobile apps). There isn’t really a technically feasible way for a crawler to somehow “infer” any kind of knowledge of how api calls are being used unless the result has some kind of publically visible side effect (E. G. The program using the api is generating a web page and uploading it somewhere crawlable). Google et Al go by how many links from other pages to the page of interest exist (inbound links) and multiply by a smattering of other things like quality of keywords, length of content etc.
That said, if you’re implying that the api changes mean that:
- people are less likely to use reddit because they can’t access it via RIF/Apollo
- less useful content is added to the site to be indexed,
- fewer inbound links will be generated that point to existing posts
- pages stagnate and drop in ranking
That is a plausible concern.
fewer inbound links will be generated that point to existing posts
pages stagnate and drop in ranking
This is what I mean, the external references people had in the periphery will dry up. Like if I’m not using Infinity to generate better refined search results, now I don’t post the link to Stack Exchange, and this reference fails to cascade across various copy paste blog resources. Now the original reddit post is a dead end source with no external weighted reference value. It’s all of these advanced features implemented in the periphery using the free API that create the usefulness in the first place.
Searching reddit will be just like YouTube searches now. No matter what technical wording you use, you’ll never find technical references again. I can type the title of a video on YT verbatim and still won’t get the correct results, but I can log into an old account and find the content in my hundreds of playlists I kept as references. It is still there, it is still public.
The other thing is that Discord search is god awful. There’s absolutely no way to modify your search for better results, whether that’s to require something to appear exactly as typed, or to exclude certain results, it’s just you put in the words and hope you get the right thing. Sometimes that works out, but sometimes it will make the dumbest connections and render your search useless unless you want to trawl through pages of crap you don’t want. Like I’ve found out that Discord considers the words universal, universe, and university to be the same…
