Discussion about the aussie.zone instance itself
So, as per images below, when you search for an Australian community associated with lemmy, lemmy.world is more likely to come up than Aussie Zone in all i've tried, bar Melbourne our most active community.
My question: Is this a problem we should consider intentional action to correct? And if so what could we do?
I'm not fussed, personally. I think of aussie.zone as its own island of calm in the storm of the Internet. It's honestly a madhouse out there and while I'm absolutely all about empowering you to dive into that maelstrom as much as you desire (in fact a decent percentage of our users do that almost exclusively and aren't regulars in our local communities), I'm not really too interested in the madness coming here and messing with what we have.
We are not set up to cope with 10,000 users coming into our communities and having a full-on flame war with personal attacks and the sort of nastiness I've seen this past week since the former President of the USA was shot at and the current Vice President announced her candidacy.
I can't stress enough how much of a pleasure it is to interact with our userbase. I'm not really limiting that statement exclusively to aussie.zone users either. The users from other places in the fediverse who have found our communities and become a part of our mix are delightful also. I am more than happy to organically grow - but my biggest fear with the instance is waking up one day to a sudden influx of tens of thousands of new users, hundreds of user reports and our existing users getting swept aside in the noise.
Seconded.
I agree wholeheartedly.
anecdotally I've simply been noticing less from this instance in my consolidated feed for some time and have unintentionally been elsewhere. I don't thinks much to it other algorithms doing algorithm things but yeah it's definitly a nice quiet corner of the internet
I think there is still a 7 day delay between az and lw and this has a big affect of the number of people that engage with az.
Basically if I post something on az, and then someone from lw comments on it, then their comment wont federate for 7 days. If I reply to them it will take another 7 days to reach them. It's kind of like communicating with far off satellites or spacecraft in space without having to send anything into space.
Yeah, we're aware of that issue. It's a limitation with the Lemmy software itself. It only synchronises one thing (comment/vote/post etc) at a time. Confirms it federated and then the next thing. Due to the physical distance between us in Australia and lemmy.world in Finland, each thing takes ~.25 seconds to federate. As there are more things to federate than there is minutes in the day, there is a backlog.
Out friends over the Tasman got around the problem by spinning up a proxy server in Finland just to grab batches of lemmy.world content and bulk transfer it to NZ. We've been invited to share the code that enables that process, but it requires us setting up our own extra host in Finland. We haven't allotted the time and funds to do that - mostly as it's a problem that is expected to correct itself in an upcoming version of the Lemmy backend software.
To be honest, I kind of like this. I get really annoyed by Americans ignoring all the "Australia" and "Aussie" everywhere and then explaining something exclusive to America to us like we're idiots. There's not as much of that over here as there was on Reddit, but I still see it happen sometimes. It's also been my experience that a decent portion of the people on LW are "minimum effort" people, they put the minimum amount of effort possible into choosing their Lemmy instance, and they also put the minimum amount of effort possible into everything else they do. I haven't had many issues with people on other instances amerisplaining things at me, it's mostly just people on LW.
It's kind of nice to put them all into a mandatory week long timeout before we have to deal with them. In the meantime, they can still see and read comments from other LW users, so they can have their little arguments about how great America is in the peace and comfort of their naughty corner. Then a week later, the conversation is usually dead and whatever garbage they wanted to spruke about America is completely irrelevant (even though it didn't have much relevancy to begin with....)
I'd almost be in favour of artificially kneecapping it so we can keep the American naughty corner forever, but this delay is affecting my meme supply and my all page is feeling quite bare
Couldn't agree more with you're sentiments @nath .
The thoughts i have leading to this post is, (in no particular order)
On lemmy Aussie Zone has become the central gathering point for Australians, and if an event like 'rexodus' happens again its not necessarily easy to find us with a very general search, even if people were inclined to.
I'm not confident organic growth will continue. Users and their activity have been pretty flat for months now on Aussie Zone, and i'm beginning to fear it might trend in the other direction. And like you, i actually quite like Aussie Zone's communities, especially when compared to the maelstrom of everything else, so i'm keen to protect it.
If Lemmy or the fediverse does begin to experience insane growth, and Aussie Zone along with that, isn't it better to have a plan?
I also would far rather a community and volunteer based organisation like Aussie Zone to have the strength to stand on its own, instead of completely ceding the social web to corporate interests. But this is definitely beyond the scope of my post today.
I agree, although it is important to have at least some plan on how to handle a sudden wave of new users. There is usually little-to-no-warning for when a place will get attention: maybe some journalist decides to mention this place, or reddit.com does another major oopsie. The Lemmy ecosystem was overall ill-prepared for the sudden massive influx, and I'd hate to repeat history.
A few things to think about (from my experiences elsewhere):
Nah, the more popular a place becomes the faster it turns to shit. Putting more effort in uhh federation? processes will draw more attention of people looking for a platform for their bullshit.
Hahaha, well yeah, whatever happens we definitely want to avoid the bullshit artists... I mean, you're stuck with me.. at the moment.. but we don't want anymore. :p
Is it more a problem of un-managed scale though?
I wonder if claiming ownership in Google Search Console would help? It would probably flow onto other search engines.
Though we might get ranked down for effectively duplicating a larger more commonly accessed site (Lemmy.world) even if the content belongs here. This could be a thing for the Lemmy developers to look into, i.e. generating a robots.txt which blocks all federated communities
~~Should just be able to do it with one rule of Disallow: /c/*@*, I think?~~
I forgot that federated posts are just under /post/* like local ones are. You'd have to block each federated post individually. Not sure if you can do that on each individual page? Certainly adding every federated post to the top-level robots.txt isn't feasible.
Posts have a canonical reference to the originating instance, e.g. this post contains <link data-inferno-helmet="true" rel="canonical" href="https://aussie.zone/post/11962005"> for me. This is a hint for search engines to ignore this post and instead index the original one instead. The same also already works for communities, this community containing <link data-inferno-helmet="true" rel="canonical" href="https://aussie.zone/c/meta">. Not sure if DDG is just ignoring this or there's another reason for it to show up multiple times.
Yeah they might have to change how Lemmy handles posts like that which might break stuff. Search engines would also have to work out that Lemmy is not a single site but a collection and since the site name does not mention Lemmy it might be more difficult
Unsurprisingly i know next to nothing about Google Search Console. Looks like it could help though. At the very least you've given me an avenue to explore and build my own knowledge. Thank you!
Yeah it's good for working out why pages aren't being indexed. I'm not aware of anything similar for bing search