If you didn’t know, on DuckDuckGo you can search for posts or magazines with site:kbin.social just like you would with Reddit. The same applies to any other Fediverse site like Kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc… I was really frustrated because it seems like Google was intentionally suppressing them.
It the other way around: kbin.social explicitly does not allow indexing by search engines. If DuckDuckGo ignores this default, the fault is basically not with Google.
Why?
Because it puts a considerable strain on Kbin’s servers, because there is a lot of content to crawl.
I suspect (hope, even) that if Kbin runs on beefier hardware some time in the future, crawling can be enabled. However, since Kbin is completely free and devoid of ads, we would probably need to start a donation drive to make that happen.
Ah, makes sense. I seems like 90% of the Fediverse’s problems revolve around size limits. I feel bad for Ernest having to deal with all of this himself.
Theres a buymeacoffee.com link in the About section at the bottom of the page.
I wouldn’t even be opposed to awards to fund stuff, although I could see the slippery slope of money 😞
Agreed. Indexing helps a LOT for discovery both of new content and old answers alike … Would love to see kbin start showing up in search results instead of Reddit when trying to find answers to technical issues…
Alternatively, a custom indexer for the fediverse could be set up. That would be a lot more efficient in teens of network traffic for everyone involved, and the search engine wouldn’t rely on a specific instance (kbin in this case) to have complete and accurate data.
To be a suitable replacement for Reddit, it’s going to have to allow it at some point. Everyone knows the way to find anything now is to add “reddit” to the search term in google now.