Ask Lemmy
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It's not about Google, it's about Reddit. Its about the users on the Internet doing searches.
I would say what I said if Google and DuckDuckGo had swapped dominate places, market-wise.
We need to have Lemmy be the best place to get search results from, and not Reddit.
And to do that, Lemmy has to be visible to Google, as it's the number one search results engine used by the most people on the Internet.
Having said that, we should actually make Lemmy available to all search engines on the Internet. We shouldn't be here to destroy Google, but to make Lemmy number one, over Reddit. Google is just a means to an end.
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Duckduckgo uses Bing for its index, so we run into the same problem with Microsoft.
Think about the steps involved. First Lemmy servers make all data available to these companies. 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.
And i dont care about Lemmy being larger than reddit. It is not just about reddit. It is about fundamentally creating a space thriving for a positove vision of how the internet should be. Handing influence to Google and Microsoft is fundamentally opposed to that.
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?
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.
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).)
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I don't think we will get any further here. If you cannot see why Lemmy should be more than just "win over Reddit" i dont think anything will convince you. The problems of enshittification are hitting all aspects of the Internet and companies like Google and Microsoft are a major part of it and undoubtedly more problematic than reddit.
Again as i said, we should not focus on destroying corporations or any other external negative thing, but instead on building a positive version of the internet, so focus on a positive internal goal. Cooperating with the organizations who fundamentally oppose this vision of the internet is not going to help that.