This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
    932·
    1 year ago

    Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there’s anything else needs to be added, we’re open to PRs.

    Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn’t be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I’d rather focus on improving lemmy’s search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.

    • yay@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      19·
      1 year ago

      Would you please consider having only local post/community/users indexed by search engines? A lemmy.ml user complained that their username is first result on Google with lemmynsfw.com domain name. Also implementing this would decrease chance of duplicate content.

      It can resolved with a simple noindex meta tag.

        • yay@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          8·
          1 year ago

          I hate Inferno (specifically class components) but I’ll check what I can do 🙏

          • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
            10·
            1 year ago

            I do too now (I created lemmy-ui when react was king), which is why the new UI will be written in leptos, using signal-based reactivity, and functional components.

    • Deebster@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      edit: This start bit is wrong; Lemmy does SSR so Javascript-free/spiders should see at least some comments.

      Lemmy is currently pretty terrible at SEO, in large part because the comments don’t load until the JS has run.

      This isn’t just a problem for search engines, it affect things like archive.org and offline reading. Earlier today I loaded a page from an instance that had dropped offline - while they had Cloudflare Always Online enabled, the page loaded without comments so it was almost useless.

      I think it’s a mistake to consider all the SEO-related concerns as irrelevant just because you don’t care about Google, etc. Most of the things necessary for good SEO are just good practices, with benefits for all users, especially in the areas of accessibility and third-party tools.

    • FrostySpectacles@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Fair enough. I’m currently focused on creating my own Lemmy web UI, but later I might have room to submit some SEO-related PRs. While I’m not yet sure what needs to be done, instance owners can get tailored recommendations from Google. I have a hunch that Lemmy is currently being penalized for duplicate content, which we might be able to mitigate by adding `` to federated posts.

      I’m fully with you on not wanting to cater to Google. On the other hand, if someone writes a helpful Lemmy post, I would like people who don’t know Lemmy to be able to find it.