Ask Lemmy

Now these companies can exploit this data fully. But the next step, it leading to lemmy results being featured on their website is no guarantee. They can just keep it low.

But why would they do that? To them it would just be another source of data to walk through as part of building a search result.

And even if you were right, having it low is better than not having it there at all whatsoever.

Plus people can specify specific sites when they're doing a search, so they can ask for a specific Lemmy search and not have it be bypassed or be at low on the search results.

Finally, reddit is destroying itself. Why should we compromise ourselves, when we can just watch reddit burning itself down, while more and more people join us?

First, even if Reddit completely self-destructs and dies, it doesn't mean Lemmy will take over, because none of the search engines have Lemmy data, they'll just be a void that someone else will fill in.

Second, why is having our data available to search engines considered compromising ourselves?

I don't really give a flying F about hurting Google, as there's always going to be a number one search engine, and most likely that's always going to be owned by a corporation. That's a red herring anyways, its not something we should be worrying about (in relation to the Reddit versus Lemmy battle, and not just morally in general).

This isn't a destroy a corporation thing, it's a make Lemmy win over Reddit thing.

I care about the users searching via Google, I want them to think the best data set for searches is on Lemmy, and not Reddit.

I also care about the users here on Lemmy who won't bother typing out comprehensive guides for things like installing computer hardware and home improvement, if they know the results can't be searched/found on the Internet by people. At the end of the day they won't bother, instead they'll just point people here to a post on Reddit (or elsewhere like Medium) that has that information, and Lemmy will end up just being a also ran to Reddit as the go-to for comprehensive how to know things or do things.

Lemmy HAS to be searchable by the search engines on the Internet, if it would wants to win against Reddit. And ignoring Reddit and just expecting them to kill themselves, that's just not going to happen.

(By the way, enjoying the civil conversation we're having on this. Thanks for keeping it classy (in a good way).)

~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~