The Small Website Discoverability Crisis
(www.marginalia.nu)
from lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 05:58
https://reddthat.com/post/64031733
from lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 05:58
https://reddthat.com/post/64031733
#selfhosted
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Cool website!
Weirdly I saw the title and was going to suggest making a search engine to only return sites with low traffic until I realised what this post was advertising.
I’d like to see ideas like this make a comeback, hopefully with some modifications this time around to protect our privacy and resist corporate exploitation.
We used to use del.icio.us and other variants to do exactly this before browsers had profiles. Back then, its primary draw was that you could take your bookmarks with you anywhere to any machine (this being before that function was baked into browsers and before web browsers could be carried in your pocket). The secondary effect was that you’d share and tag those websites with your own categories/descriptors, thus crowdsourcing a new version of the old web’s link directories using Web 2.0. You could browse through symantic tag clouds to discover new things. Del.icio.us was for websites, but people were tagging and logging all of their favorite stuff and sharing it online so that like minded strangers could filled the gaps in their cultural awareness. We tagged our books with librarything. We tagged recipes with recipe thing. Audioscrobbler (later known as last.fm) logged our music listening to automate the tagging, not by direct symantic tagging, but by relational/temporal coincidence. If other people that listened to a lot of the stuff you listened to and they also listened to some other stuff you didn’t, those became recommendations for you. That kind of relational algorithm would survive the slow death of Web2.0 to become the backbone of recommendation services like Spotify and probably even TikTok.
i know, right?
if only there was a way to tell other people about these websites in … some kind of an … internet forum. and if the forum was on a nice, not too bot-infested, privacy-respecting, free, distributed and federated platform. that would be cool. one can wish…
The people here are the problem. They screech and scare anyone less than social democrats on the spectrum.
Reddit was never close to as an echo chamber.
My experience was that every sub reddit itself was an echo chamber.
Not having the majority opinion of the subreddit meant getting negative scores because of downvoters, which lead to deleted posts because of that stupid karma system.
But yeah, suggesting a permanent solution for both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict on Lemmy by criticizing BOTH sides doesn’t get you sympathy points here either.
Even here, the guy you’re responding to is getting down voted to oblivion (for Lemmy anyways) for an opinion that I have echoed elsewhere and gotten the opposite response.
Not having the majority opinion of this community seems to mean downvotes too. The only real difference is that reddit has enough staying power for people to put up with it.
I’m on a Lemmy instance that has downvotes disabled. I can only see that the person I replied to has 3 upvotes and that me previous comment has 2. I don’t even see the negativity on Lemmy.
He’s at -5 at the moment. Depending on what instances you have blocked, you’re going to see different amounts. It doesn’t mean those people aren’t there.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/1454e7bb-d320-4e09-813a-b56823b65e91.avif">
Good that we don’t have karma here…
Even if the post is true, it was the worst way to present it. It reads like trolling:
Call out people’s politics with grandiose rhetoric, not backing up any claims with links to evidence.
Declare the other side is unbiased.
I mean, Internet 101 would dictate you downvote and disengage. It’s not going to generate a discussion that would change minds or be constructive. Even now we’re not talking about small website discoverability, but instead downvotes.
EDIT: I’m going to put my money where my mouth is. I’ll try the same post.
If you’d like evidence of the toxic or extreme side of Lemmy, it’s not hard to find. Are we really disagreeing that this is a problem with Lemmy? Regardless, you’re misrepresenting OP with the “declare the other side is unbiased”.
This conversation started started with pushing back on the idea of using Lemmy as a solution to small site discoverability. The toxicity and social aspects are perfectly relevant.
right right. Totally agree. The community here hurts it’s discoverability. My criticism is only in the way to the post was worded.
I had this big explanation, but I realized it’s not worth it. I already covered what I wanted to say.
I don’t think it’s a here or there problem, I think it’s a human nature problem tbh.
This is a self-hosted sub. You are going to see a lot of anti-establishment, anti-corporation stuff here because it’s a core principle and/or concern of many users looking into self-hosting. That tends to come with attached behaviors like you described.
While I would tend to agree that it’s unfortunate that you have to wade through a lot of folks knee-jerk blanket commenting on certain topics, and that those screeching comments are annoying, Lemmy is generally a big tent, so you will need to accept their presence, the same way we have to just ignore all the AI Slop software presented here.
The price of freedom is accepting the screechers.
Lemmy suffers from the same discoverability issue… so we aren’t exactly the best place to tell others about obscure websites. From the start we’ve inherited an open-source community that leans liberal, and aside one very large recent shift that means that the community also leans mostly Democrat.
What does that have to do with discoverability? Well, one look at a front page can clue you in. (gosh I hope these screenshots shrink in size for display)
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cee6d655-6cba-4cf7-8c08-c95e0174db33.png">
IT, Politics, and Star Trek all over the front page of my instance. Possibly worse on others. Imagine if your 80 year old great-grandma landed on this page. All she knows is what Fox News says. Instant close on the website. Not even going to open one discussion. But let’s say she did open the one about the FBI director being missing:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4c6d0d41-b2db-4948-a0cb-7f0f722a9702.png">
oh my
Now let’s see a competing website:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f5bd6101-5f51-4687-bf0c-33125ad75e10.png">
Oh, new Chinese food place! Remote work isn’t working? Carrying your dog to pick up food? that’s silly! 2.7 million of wine! She must have really hated that job!
So what is my point? How can Lemmy increase it’s discoverability? I feel like community diversity would be the #1 concern. Well… one obvious action is to sanitize the front page of the popular instances. I’m going to assume that’s a highly unpopular opinion, because then it wouldn’t be Lemmy anymore. Maybe perhaps there is a different frontpage for logged out and logged in users? With politics being an opt-in for active sessions? Or maybe we should just post more cute cats.
What do you guys think? Am I completely wrong about community diversity? What changes would you make to Lemmy? It’s not an easy answer.
Vast, vast majority of sites that exist are small. And significant portion, if not most of them are going to be actually not that interesting or outright junk. Who’s going to decide which are good enough to show up on the list? And how are you going to maintain them over time—if you succeed in making a small site discoverable, now what, is it going to be on the list forever? If not, on what kind of criteria you’re going to maintain it, and how are you going to measure it?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying people should built these lists, they absolutely should. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution and creating something that resembles one-size-fits-all is going back to the twisted, weird system that so many of Lemmy users (including me) are happy to be away from.
I see no problems with the screenshot you posted. Of course that “KIA” comment is extremely insensitive at best, but we all know that any sort of open Internet community has this problem.
If you find Reddit more interesting, then you have already solved the problem for you: just go discover things there. If you find your Lemmy homepage boring, maybe sub to different communities and set up your page to show subscribed only (that particular setting helped me a lot).
If you want to create some sort of smart automated strategies that get you to have the the cake and eat it too (eg. remain subscribed to all of those communities but filter posts for based on some sort of diversity criteria eg. “no star trek more than once a month”) then please go ahead and experiment: the content is freely available using computer-readable formats, you can learn to code or hire someone… I bet someone is already doing something like that. You don’t need to solve the problem on higher level, and doing so is going to do more harm than good.
But as you say, it’s not an easy problem but I think it shouldn’t be. No individual should be able to impose restrictions like that globally. We are each responsible for our own diet. (And for lemmy.world thank mods for keeping out the shit sprayers.)
I love the fact that federation means we could have a grandma-focused instance that applies all my hypothetical filters by default. It’s possible… but there is currently no desire to become the front page of the internet. We’re a niche, and that just means we aren’t the place to try to advertise for the little guy.
wanting to advertise for the little guy in general is kind of pointless, it feels good until you realize that in a healthy ecosystem there are just always going to be more little guys–the middle guys are selected from larger pool and the big ones are selected from larger pool of the middle guys … it’s the evolution. and evolution is all about niches and being good enough.
the kind of link lists linked in the OP are actually awesome, but they are best served in larger number and in context. especially, if eg. i see someone make an insightful post or article and turns out the same person has a list of links, then it’s usually a treasure trove of more posts, articles, insights and even projects and communities. and yes, if i gave the link list to my mom it would be completely counter-productive, regardless of whether someone is a “little guy” or not. the littleness is not the point, the relevancy is.
and sure you could make link lists that are assorted ranging topics with the main criterion “the author found it interesting and want to share it and/or come back later to it”, and while some of that cake is eaten by micro-blogging sites like mastodon or bluesky (esp. the sharing and quick discussion). outright simple, structured lists also have own kind of charm.
Yeah, I think something like this is good, and was a mainstay in the early 2000’s personal web pages.
Another approach I like (but also dislike because of a bug preventing my site being indexed) is https://aboutideasnow.com/
Awesome!
I love the sound of this, and so to start it off, I’ve added a very rushed together section on my personal website (and yes, absolutely a plug for my very static website).
It only points to this post’s bookmark list and my personal list of high quality YouTubers, but I do want to maintain a fairly high standard of things I’d want to link there, which is why I’ll leave that to a time when I’m less preoccupied.
I’m onboard with this! Great idea that only takes a little effort and big returns! The small web can stay small but some aids in discoverability is not a bad thing!