About 4 people at work Monday discovered the blackouts and learned the reason from following Google results. I'd say that shows the effectiveness of the protest. That's 4 individuals that I work with personally who wouldn't have known otherwise about the api problem that now do. I can only imagine how many people are in that same boat.
honestly we should have collectively realized way earlier that putting all the useful, readable, un-touched-by-SEO help content for basically every niche hobby fandom and ideology in the hands of one for-profit entity was not very wisdom-pilled of us
I've said it numerous times over the years, the Internet has been centralizing rapidly and it benefits none of us.
In 2005 you'd wander around, going from peoples' personal pages to forums to whatever else people linked. In 2015 half of those websites were dead because everyone got their content on reddit anyway.
some people have, but whenever you'd mention it, you'd be met with "lol take the tinfoil hat off", "but we're already using [for-profit platform] why would we move when everyone's here" and "but it's haaaaaaard".
I agree, but I also have serious concerns about this being the replacement strategy. It could be because of my ignorance of how this all works though. Like many of you, I am new and here because of the reddexodus.
These servers are going to cost money, and for many of them the money will run out. Is there a function to preserve the collective content of an entire server once it goes dark? I know that you can migrate your own account to another server, but what happens to everything Google has indexed at Lemmy.world if the worst happens? Is it all just dead links? What if many of the users do not migrate? Is it just gone?
I am concerned that in the current state we are setting up to burn everything that loses a couple admins or becomes too old to economically host.
I was on a mastodon server and the owner decided it was not worth his money to keep running. He did not inform anyone on the server or allow any account backups and all was lost.
With federated services, I feel like it's somewhat important to get to know the admins of the server you use. You don't have to be best friends, but at least know their name, motivation for running the server, and how it's funded.
These are certainly possibilities! It's happened elsewhere in the Fediverse... but already we can export most of our data and migrate to a different instance. Getting these base features right is important before enhancing their functionality. Planning for the future is important too. So far I've been impressed by Lemmy, though it's not nearly as portable as Mastodon or Calckey or Pleroma etc. Part of that is that in Lemmy/kbin we don't follow other users... we subscribe to groups (subs/communities/magazines).
Still, with the nature of ActivityPub, it's inevitable that migration tools for Reddit-like federated apps will get built quick-like
I'm sorry, but clearly you have not looked for niche information on Google for a while now. Lots of links end in dead ones, particularly when I am looking for vehicle information on older models.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say, we shouldn't be concerned because this problem already happened?
A lot niche older vehicle information, if it wasn't hosted on Reddit, was often on forums funded by enthusiasts, which eventually ran out of money and no longer exist. This is exactly the problem that I'm concerned about. Particularly so if a certain community balloons in popularity and an admin nukes it to keep the server costs under control for the other members.
Completely what I'm saying, but to add on it is not just forums. With the new web, I've hit a deadend on many OEM websites as well, and part websites, and others. I'm sure cell phone and computer information is similar, in fact after trying to research a power supply for my old prebuilt I know it's a fight.
If we have communities sync'ed on multiple instances we can solve that. At first this was my presumption for how the federation works, but I then learned /c/Pennsylvania on one instance is helpful local news and on another its right-wing propaganda.
Before reddit removed them most of this compiled knowledge was in the subreddit wikis. I honestly believe a return to communities with wikis is the long term replacement.
we can still easily fall into this trap if there isn't a good way to migrate communities between instances. And even if we could just take /c/technology@beehaw.org and move the whole thing to /c/technology@feddit.de or something, that would still break all the indexers' links
I just can't agree more with you. Like wow this reddit blackout has truthfully opened my eyes to the massive, giant and incredibly amount of useful information that is currently resting on reddit servers.
If you've ever owned an older car, you know that this is the absolute best approach.
Good luck getting exceptionally niche advice for things like that on reddit. Forums get so much more specific, you get an entire forum dedicated to one car model that was only built for 5 years and a bunch of people there know literally everything about it, like the fact that you're better off getting an aftermarket PCV valve because those are built a bit better and don't fail early, or the fact that the shifter cable has the tendency to get water in it so you better be careful shifting out of park on a really cold morning, you might just snap the cable if it's old.
This is the only part of the blackout that has stung for me. I can't find any meaningful conversations or posts on Google when I'm trying to compare products. It's just a bunch of random blogs praising products so you will click their affiliate link. Ran into this earlier when I was trying to compare remote desktop apps.
exactly this. none of the other reviews are trustworthy... like why would i trust a NYT article on the best dry herb vapes to get, they just want to make money off clicking their links. and the worst offenders are all those ranking of different "top 10" lists where each is its own page, so that you'll get 10 sets of ads lmao
That's exactly why the first thing I did when I got here was create m/dryherbvapes because there's no way to get real advice from real enthusiasts anymore.
@Phobos this is why I don't like when people mentions that they are deleting and scraping their accounts... Even though I completely understand and support them, but Reddit was such a good place to find good answer... And everything will be lost
I haven't scrapped my post history just yet, but I intend to. I figured if I had posted anything useful (99.9% of it is just comments like this), wouldn't it remain accessible in an archive site that doesn't feed into Reddit's traffic?
Gotta say that RustDesk (nightly) is my new fav. Got locked out from AnyDesk after helping too many people on discord and now run my own instance for my private stuff. My only wish is that it can let me connect to people outside of my instance without removing the server address every time.
I've been using Splashtop for a while. The consumer tier is pretty affordable and the professional is very reasonable. TeamViewer bends you over a barrel on price, but you can use it personally for free. Trouble is, if you use it a lot for free, you'll find yourself banned.
I agree. Looking for TTRPG related stuff, about the only place that has meaningful conversation is reddit, and most (all?) of those threads are locked. While I agree with the reasoning behind it, it does make it more annoying to find information.
IMO, if they continue blackouts regularly, I'd rather they locked comments & new posts, rather than the entire subreddit. Google cache/wayback machine are fine, but certainly more work to use.
I get where you’re coming from, but on the flip-side all this disruption means the blackout campaign is working. Reddit thinks they can just ride this out, but right now their reputation is being eviscerated - not just among us Redditors, but with other companies like Google, and the general public that is being directed there only to find themselves locked out.
All of these things dramatically increase the pressure on Reddit… and the longer it goes, the greater the pressure. At some point, the board will force spez to capitulate or replace him due to the damage his poor monetization strategies have caused to the company’s reputation and value… but only if we all hold the line and keep the subs dark.
That said, it’s pretty nice here, so I plan on staying either way.
SEO as a concept needs to die. dont get me wrong i want Lemmy to show up in google results but doing that by spamming keywords and unrelated “related” posits is not the move
the reality is that current-day SEO isn't even Optimization, it's Lying. try googling a recipe or an alternative to a popular software and see how the first four pages are all ad-ridden, useless spam-bot articles designed to retain users rather than give them the information they are looking for
This also highlights the problem with a lot of communities moving to Discord, which inevitably ends up as repositories for critical information, but can't be indexed by Google. Reddit is still valuable as a problem solving resource, and I hope they fix this API fiasco.
The other thing is that Discord search is god awful. There's absolutely no way to modify your search for better results, whether that's to require something to appear exactly as typed, or to exclude certain results, it's just you put in the words and hope you get the right thing. Sometimes that works out, but sometimes it will make the dumbest connections and render your search useless unless you want to trawl through pages of crap you don't want. Like I've found out that Discord considers the words universal, universe, and university to be the same...
For quite a long time now when troubleshooting tech issues, I've started searches with site:reddit.com. Hopefully indexing on kbin and lemmy is decent enough going forward that they can pick up the slack. Otherwise, you get a lot of results that are either official tech support forums which always respond with basic troubleshooting, or outside forum posts with no real resolution.
I had to stop and think about this carefully, but I realized that I only used Reddit to find technical answers for personal stuff - like dealing with shenanigans in Windows or problems with games. I work as a DevOps engineer, and when I need to find a technical answers for work Reddit is not usually helpful. I think we'll be fine.
There doesn't appear to be robots.txt restrictions. I can get back results by doing a site:kbin.social search or a site:lemmy.ml search.
I think that a bigger issue is that the fediverse systems are designed to span multiple hosts. There's no convenient syntax to ask Google to search all content on a given fediverse platform, because it spans different domains. Reddit content is on reddit.com, so the site: operator is sufficient.
I think if maybe someone just creates a kbin or lemmy mirror site that all it does is collect data from all the instance for google as well as preserving it in the case an instance goes offline would be a great idea
Since this whole recent dumpster fire with reddit started, that's been the one thing I've been loudly complaining about is the potential or realized plans for some subreddits to move to Discord servers. For informational purposes rather than just acting as a chat platform, Discord is a BAD idea. It essentially adds a walled garden to everything. There's zero discovery by design.
Before reddit removed them most of this compiled knowledge was in the subreddit wikis. I honestly believe a return to communities with wikis is the long term replacement.
Honestly, not a bad opinion, when the wikis were done well, they did have some extremely useful information. I wonder if we could do something like that in Lemmy...
Yeah, thought of that, but while I did do a quick attempt prior to my comment, and while I could get cached copies of some pages in the Reddit domain, for whatever reason, my attempts to pull up random comments didn't seem to have Google having cached copies for those pages. Not sure what determines whether Google has a cached copy or not.
Oh, and IIRC there's a a browser plugin.
goes looking
Yeah, official browser plugin for Firefox and for Chrome for the Wayback Machine, so if one is doing this a lot, one can slightly reduce the time to bounce through the archive.org site.
Ran into it multiple times today, really annoying that eventually if these subreddits are closed or the content deleted were effectively losing a decade plus of useful content
Was talking to one of my friends about this the other day. Reddit has close to two decades of answers to questions from experts in their respective fields and now between subs going private and people purging their accounts a lot of that data is about to disappear which really fucking sucks.
Whole wealth of information that people can grow from going down the drain over one man's desire to be the next Zuckerberg.
That’s why I wish people would just go dark rather than full delete of data. Deleting all your data isn’t going to hurt Reddit as much as everyone else who might really benefit from your comment.
I understand that too. It’s why I always tried to never give out anything too personal on Reddit. I only posted something I was ok with people seeing/finding. Over 10 years that amassed to a lot, most of it drivel in places like r/askreddit. But in subs dedicated to hobbies, I want people to see my content because their content helped me at some point(I never subbed to a hobby sub until I visited it enough to warrant it adding to my front page scroll).
Had this happen several times today while looking for info on Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Clicked on perfect links that took me to Reddit. I'm glad several other threads existed on Steam else I'd still be stuck. Minor inconvenience given that making subs private is pretty much all that can be done at this point!
It's definitely something that made me realise we might actually have a chance at inconveniencing enough people. I was searching for some stuff yesterday, came across Reddit links which I checked, only to find that the sub was private. As long as the mods aren't all replaced, and we delete our old comments if they are, Reddit looses enough content to make it useless as a good resource.
google has been bad for a long, long time. It's no wonder its not functional without reddit. Should be a lesson for all the big companies to not bury communities.
Bing ironically, with it’s new AI interface, is actually rather good now. Still don’t use it though unless I really must, some habits are hard to break.
I agree. For this reason I started branching out to other search engines. My favourite is Kagi. It’s superior to Google in every way, but it requires a subscription. Bing is surprisingly good now, depending on the content. Neeva is an excellent alternative to Google. Yandex for those who would like to avoid American censorship.
That's also what I love. Their focus is on delivering the best quality results, as opposed to delivering the results which pay Google the most.
I also really love that you can block or down-rank domains. Google is RIFE with low quality domains serving terrible results, and they don't offer any way to eliminate them.
Having to add "reddit" to search terms was a sign of a problem in my opinion.
Either the search was broken because non-reddit results were trash 8/10 times or straight forward quality answers just weren't a thing elsewhere. So much spammy articles or long winded articles without that reddit filter. Questionable reviews for products or recommendations too. And that is without considering chatgbt fueled spam.
oh god searching for something like "windows random bluescreen" is filled with stupid results. Reddit was the only source for good information with people asking questions with similar terms
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