Towards the fediverse as a repository of knowledge like how reddit used to be

One of the extremely useful things about reddit was that content was somewhat organized by URL. Each post was created in a subreddit. So you could do websearch like keyword site:reddit.com/r/subreddit

This is more difficult/impossible on the threadiverse.

I am not sure to what extent it is configurable on either platform, but quickly looking I see URLs like this:

  • lemmy: https://lemmyinstance.tld/post/0000000; no community/magazine context is present
  • kbin: https://kbininstance.tld/m/magazinename/t/00000/the-title-of-the-post-is-optionally-included

I like the kbin way of doing this because it provides the possibility of searching as with reddit.

Are there any potential solutions to this problem? I haven't even mentioned various other hurdles inherent to the distributed nature of the fediverse content. So feel free to enumerate those.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to want this feature. What is the status of it?

solowolf,

The general setup of Kbin was a little confusing at first but after playing with it for a few moments was easy

density,
@density@kbin.social avatar

Still working on making on-topic responses I see. :) you'll get there eventually. just give it a few more moments.

solowolf,

this is true

Die4Ever,

there’s been some talk about changing the way the URLs are formatted for Lemmy

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2097

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/875

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987

density,
@density@kbin.social avatar

Thanks for sharing! Looks like a lot of agreement and no opposition. Just a matter of getting it done. Hopefully someone who has the skill and time will get it on their TODO list someday.

palordrolap,

I only know that one time an obscure thing I was talking about here on kbin.social, perhaps as a response to a post on some Lemmy or another, ended up being indexed incredibly quickly by Google regardless of however things are structured in URLs.

This became apparent when I tried to do further research on the topic and I found myself staring at my own comment as federated on yet another Lemmy.

As long as search engines remain as on the ball as whatever happened there, we might actually end up with a repository anyway.

density,
@density@kbin.social avatar

Is there a name for that phenomena? It used to happen to me with reddit.

Especially disappointing for longstanding problems that I would walk away from and return to at a later date. I would of course initiate a renewed effort with a websearch containing key words. I guess in a sufficiently idiosyncratic/unique way that I would find my own thread, but not recognize it. Momentarily get excited like "this person has the precise same problem as I do!" hoping there would be a solution in the thread. Only to realize that the whole thing was a little too framiliar and it was myself, last year, struggling with the same problem having made zero progress.

Do you think that's why you found your own writing? Like if I am trying to research the present question and I do a search with keywords like fediverse repository knowledge lemmy kbin URL search reddit I could imagine finding this because it is an unusual combination of words. But if I were to use totally different phrasing I doubt I would get here.

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