Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:
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I wouldn’t worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)
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Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn’t fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren’t yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.
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Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit’s leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.
Does it actually matter though because Lemmy contents are replicated by federated servers, thus big Lemmy instances such as lemmy.world might have contents from smaller federated instances as well. Try using
site:lemmy.worldnext time and see if it’ll improve the search result, though Lemmy.world is just 2 months old so maybe Google hasn’t indexed it allThat’s a good point. If you filter by a major site, then it’ll have content from all the major communities.
That won’t help if you’re looking for niche content, but that’s not as important.
I wonder how replicated data shows up to the indexer. I don’t know enough about search engine indexing or SEO. Will google index replicated data? Presumably it won’t index feeds or searches, it’ll index the actual posts, and I wonder if replicated posts are considered posts for the purposes of indexing or if the indexer will only look at local posts.