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.
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i find that most of the information and recommendations i have seen on Lemmy is about what NOT to do or use. dont use this service, dont use this Linux version
All knowledge available for all, should be the goal. Us vs. them train of thought is so old and tiring but still continues to light a fire under some.
knowledge that Reddit has and will always have
I deleted all of my comments and posts from reddit.
Oh hell no. Lemmy is an extremely specific filter bubble and absolutely not suitable to replace even the worst search engine.
I don’t use reddit results much at all anymore thanks to it constantly trying to force me to use the app, which I don’t have. I do try to force lemmy into search results by adding it to the search terms when appropriate.
Problem is that Lemmy/Fediverse simply doesn’t have the established depth and breadth of information that reddit does yet, and reddit does have it because it sort of killed the internet forums that would have existed foe those subjects. I agree, it’d be great to have more knowledge sources in Lemmy. Growing the community types would be a start, but that needs people and participation, and growth is hard.
Problem is that Lemmy/Fediverse simply doesn’t have the established depth and breadth of information that reddit does yet, and reddit does have it because it sort of killed the internet forums that would have existed foe those subjects.
That’s the problem OP is asking you to help solve.
Exactly this. We need to start investing in the Fediverse and stop depending on Reddit or any of the big techs. WE all built their content. We can do it again FREELY.
I think it shouldn’t be a competition but possibly something with added value. Possibly in the form of structure, ie something that doesn’t create hundreds of same/similar questions but constantly updates the best answers closest to the existing date. (Alphabetically searchable hashtags, etc…, build it communally, ie #NoStupidQuestions , how to best build a free information platform?).
Oh yeah, not a competition really, just post anything and on any Fediverse platform. We need to dog food the Fediverse. Let’s stop taking the easy way. Sure, find an answer if you like, but come back here tondhare with all of us. We need to build our own library of Alexandria.
Is there a way to encourage people to post more? Because the main problem seems to be getting actual posts, not replies to them.
For example “nostupidquestions” only has a few questions a day, but there are 40k subscribers and 1500 people or so checking in every day. It has 4.2k posts and 170k comments.
“asklemmy” has more posts, fewers subscribers, and over 2k a day check in. 6k posts and 317k comments.
This is what I’m getting at. We can only control ourselves, so let’s be tenacious in posting more here. Again it doesn’t have to be a technical question. It could just be “hey I had this issue I fixed it withblah”. Whatever you’re passionate in.
This is a habit that prevalent everywhere, even on reddit. Only 20 or even 10 % of people produce content and rest just watch/consume. If we can have that kind of split on lemmy, it would be fine.
Indeed, the vast majority on any social media platform does not engage. And when they do it’s mostly just liking content and not even replying. You see it on lemmy as well, with news articles often having few comments. And when they do it’s one or two top comments and a bunch of replies.
Over the years the only thing I can imagine is to add another anonymizing layer, where people can send in questions and the “best ones” are posted by a general/bot account. But that is something people much smarter than me have tried to figure out for years, so I have no idea how it would be implemented.
I remember a social media platform where each user had a thread specific ID “curious rabbit/astonished baboon”, and users can discuss anything without any fear. The moment you created a new thread or participate in a new thread, your ID changed. I think it fizzled out eventually, but the concept was interesting.
But can people find your question on lemmy by googling?
coz thats how i personally found reddit back in the day. And i’m sure it is part of how reddit grew to what it is today.
If google cant find you, you cannot be a success, is my guess. But of course, NOT being found on google has it advantages too.
I can find this topic by searching on lemmy
but i cannot search comments, which limits the usability somewhat
If you can’t find your answer on Lemmy or anywhere on the Fediverse, just ask. We need all kinds. No one answered after a few days, ask somewhere else. Use these moments to kick start conversations. It’s more work, but it’ll be worth it.
i dont know if google shows lemmy results but duckduckgo does
Another idea is an asking system that compiles answers from the web while also posting the question here. Gives the benefit of immediate answers while also populating the fediverse.
Love it. As long as we’re active IMO. Random people saying there’s no content, let’s give them that content. Let’s be here enjoying ourselves, talking, sharing, and they’ll come. But we have to be tenacious. Support each other as well. Less thumbs up and more actual comments. COMMUNICATING is what the internet is for. Sure thumbs up, but make a quick comment on a post. Get interacting
What’s the right translation for “pepper” in German? And red pepper, green pepper and so on? I found several words that seem to mean pepper, but not sure if any is better than the others.
Lol well I meant across the Fediverse, but I like you’ve started immediately. :-D.
Also, Bell pepper is Paprika in german
Pepper is Pfeffer, red pepper is roter Pfeffer, green pepper is grüner Pfeffer und so weiter. Ich hoffe ich konnte ihnen helfen. Einen schönen Tag noch.
Pepper can also translate to Paprika though when talking about plants. A pepper plant is a paprika in German. Spicy peppers are chillies.
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! 😋
finally, a recipe with a unique killer flavor
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.
Ok then.
Why does everyone hate the issi classic in GTA online, everytime I take my little beast out for a drive some massive car or Batmobile comes along and focuses their energy on destroy it.
I just want to do tiny burnouts.
Lol I didn’t mean in this exact post. But I love the question! Go make a post in a relevant community and get conversations moving. Even if you think only you are interested, I’ve found lots of folks share similar ideas and dont even realize it.
Nah I’m all good, it’ll get answered here. I believe in the power of Lemmy.
At least four, possibly more.
Finally I get an answer, thank you.
I agree.
Ty! :-)
That needs to be in the form of a question, right?
Lol brilliant.
I don’t know, does it?
Kagi has a search lens for Fediverse forums like Lemmy. More content in Lemmy will make that even better
Love this. Yes anywhere on the Fediverse. I wonder if Searxng has a Fediverse search.
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.
I wish yacy was better. Federated/self hosted search should be awesome.
Would you prefer something limited to searching federated content, or something closer to yacy where it crawls normal websites too?
There is one worry I have about Lemmy being the knowledge of anything and it’s what happened on reddit. Many people went through and nuked their comments, essentially making many posts useless. There are already people here on lemmy that delete their profiles, comments and start over every few months. Not really sure what that means for all the federation, but I assume different instances may have different versions of deleted information in the long run?
the whole point is a living breathing community, not a wiki
when somethings alive things die and go away forever, when everythings perserved it feels like a tomb, a place to record stuff not actively engage, im hella exagerating, I just like that ppl own their own content a bit more than reddit
On the flip side, keeping your personal online footprint small is definitely more secure.
Maybe we need a soft kill switch to disassociate content with an account after x amount of time. Like for me personally, I’ve put zero effort into mopping up old content, and as often as I post, I’m sure someone with the desire could put the pieces together and dox me.
I’ve left it up anyway cuz I don’t want to do to Lemmy what you’re concerned about, but if I could nuke all my content older than a few months into an anonymous version, I’d be all for that. Leave the info up for anyone who might benefit from it.
That said, for community building sake, I’d hate to see posts go anonymous right out the gate like some 4chan shit; and posts should be associated with an account at least long enough for mods to have a reasonable amount of time to take action against an account that breaks the rules. But again, posts that are months old? The conversation there is over - my personal involvement is moot at that point, it’s just data now.
Disassociating with old comments and posts would be a good way to go, but I’m not really sure that’s an option for the fediverse? In theory couldn’t someone in the future set up an instance whose sole purpose is just back up and collect data? How would someone even go about trying to erase themselves from a situation like that?
I don’t think there would be any way to protect from that, but you’d have the same issue with full deletion.
You’re absolutely right, somebody totally could do that (instances that don’t respect post/reply deletion requests are already a known issue), and there’s very little you could do about that sort of thing once it’s already happened.
We can make a Fedi-Wiki that requires you to agree to the terms that everything you publish is considered public, kinda like a source code under GPL.
Edit: Lol I just remembered it’s called Creative Commons. Its what Wikipedia uses.
One of the lemmy devs is also working on a federated wiki. On mobile, so no link, but i think it’s Ibis?
You can’t stop people changing their mind about deleting stuff. That can and should happen for any number of reasons, both good and bad. There are servers that would still have the information, but it feels like there’s less incentive to fully delete an account on the Fediverse as you can literally pick up the same conversation with a new account. Maybe I just don’t do enough social media use and miss the point. I deleted my stuff from Reddit, because I don’t want to help Reddit and it should be my private data. Fediverse we are all public and there is no tracking anyway. So whoever you are here, you’re it here, no where else, even with the same name.
