but Lemmy already does show up on Google results

https://www.google.com/search?q=Lemmy+wouldn%27t+really+takeoff+to+replace+Reddit+until+it%27s+content+is+search+indexable

Isn’t Lemmy content being openly indexed by most search engines? I think we just don’t have the years of content here, so it’s not going to have the same gravity.

Also, I wonder about all the varied domain names of all the servers. Would search engines treat them all as separate sites, and calculate page rank for each separately? If that’s the case, the influence of Lemmy in search results would be even lower.

Listen, it's not our job to make Google search result better. They could have easily parsed apub sites like lemmy correctly of they want, but they're so enshittified there's low chance of that. But that doesn't mean we should be trying to fix their shit.

You are assuming the point of this is to be famous rather than non profit niche community driven

It's a bad idea to compare Lemmy to Reddit or expect Lemmy to replace Reddit.

Slow growth is not a problem, it's actually a benefit.

There is no hurry, and no need to push for high user counts.

Rather than trying to attract more people, focus on making your communities an attractive place to be.

As many others have already said, Lemmy is fully indexable by search engines. In fact, in this very community there have been posts about Lemmy content being above other results from more prominent sites like Reddit for certain topics.

I mostly agree with the OP, it would be great if Lemmy had more sources of newbies than just "pissed off redditors". (I have further reasons for that, but they don't matter here.) As such I'll focus on specific tidbits here and there.

The content is indexable (by Google), but your point stands as it sucks. It's hard to reliably find Lemmy content by it.

Do you - or anyone here - have a good idea on how to solve that? Someone suggested a Lemmy-based engine; it's tempting but it wouldn't help if the person doesn't know about Lemmy already.

Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure

It used to be like this. "Stumbling" upon the site was only a thing later, as it had already enough content to become a source of info.

Lemmy won't catch on until there are groups of communities you can ban at once. Sports, Linux, German, pervy anime... It's a very rare user who will put up with the absolute dreck of the initial feed and manually block communities until they have a feed that's marginally personalized.

Then there's the fact that any communities that are specific to peoples interests are completely empty.

On Kagi there’s a fediverse lens (basically a filter)

Lemmy will be indexed less than Reddit, ignoring user counts, because lemmy-ui is client rendered. Googlebot and some others can still index client rendered sites, but others will ignore the content.

Why rely on google which is going down on reliability so quickly.

What we need is a GOOD lemmy based search engine. Which I think is entirely possible with current lemmy implementation.

And that's OK. The Internet was better before everyone was using it.

Even if it's indexed, there's no single website to search for so even if I add "Lemmy" to help, it won't look for content where Lemmy isn't mentioned.

The mistake that was made was making the decentralization something that affects the front end. If the backend was decentralized and the front end was a single default website with people being able to create alternatives (but everyone being guaranteed access to all the content), that wouldn't be an issue. We could tell new users "Sign up on Lemmy.com and if you decide you don't like the UI just choose an alternative and use the same credentials to sign in." No one would know you're using a different UI, all content would be searchable by adding site:lemmy.com to your query.

i don't want lwmmy to take off, i like it rn

I didn't discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.

I think the main problem with searching for fediverse posts is not that they're not indexed but the lack of a singular tag to append when you want to search for them. To search for reddit posts it was easy because you could put in your keywords and stick 'reddit' or 'site:reddit.com' onto the end, but now there's too many domains to keep track of and you can't rely on appending 'lemmy' pointing a search engine towards all Lemmy instances, let alone kbin/mbin instances.

I'd rather Lemmy burn to the ground than become famous, seriously watching AND experiencing twitter, reddit, Facebook, MySpace, my-yearbook, and (does Skype count?). I would like to make Lemmy my forever social media. Only time will tell if it lasts though.

good, keep it small and un-fucked with. the more eyes on it, the more in danger its in of either enshittification or being blocked by govs that don't want open conversation.