A great use for reddit is the ability to search posts and opinions about any niche topic. Will that be possible with Lemmy as it grows? Will I be able to Google “instant rice Lemmy” and get a comprehensive tier list of each brand?
I imagine search engines will have trouble with all the different instances(?). EDIT: Especially with instances that don’t have Lemmy in their name, I don’t think search engines would return them for Lemmy searches?
I would argue that eventually, yes, one will be able to google search Lemmy just like Reddit.
I wish there was a way to get an entire Reddit archive over here. Realistically I’m still going to have to search Reddit because it has 10+ years of answers to obscure questions.
Only if we make sure the tech giants don’t kill this platform
How would they? It’s all decentralized
Google could prevent lemmy pages from showing up in the results for example.
Or they could adapt the protocol, make their own slightly tweaked version of it and let it die, which apparently often also kills the original protocol due to newly introduced compatibility issues, etc.
Not sure about the second part, I read about it here somewhere where they mentioned an example of that happening as well but I can’t find it anymore.
They could join the fediverse, attract a majority of users to their platform by adding attractive features, and then remove themselves from the fediverse effectively killing it
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Like xmpp
Make a giant instance, get all the content there by pumping users and making cool shit, slowly customize your instance and extend the protocol with features so that ours become incompatible in annoying ways
Add wikis, overhaul user profiles, achievements, posting to your own profile, games, whatever, then get tired of supporting the fediverse interface and shut off the API
You instantly can’t read 95% of your subscribed /f/s