14
The Small Website Discoverability Crisis
(www.marginalia.nu)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
14 points (100.0% liked)
Selfhosted
59464 readers
23 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
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...
Or a Directory of some sort....
Are WebRings still owned by something?
the side bars for each community can effectively be a webring. i'm talking about these things here:
(example is the sidebar of the /c/selfhosted@lemmy.word community)
@postmateDumbass @netvor not that I know of
I forget who Sage sold to, it may have been yahoo.. oh well. Sooooo last century.
nice, mediocrely bot-infested, publicly readable, donation-funded, distributed and federated platform
ftfy
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)
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:
oh my
Now let's see a competing website:
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.
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.