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c/fediverse · by gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 138d

The Small Website Discoverability Crisis

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-crisis/

TL;DR: link to sites. link to communities. don't just post content, but more importantly make people aware that the community exists.

if you post 10 articles but nobody knows that the community exists, that's worth less than if you only post 5 articles but 3 people read them.

link to communities that interest you in places where people might want to know about them. sticker some link on your irl shared gardening project. maybe to slrpnk.net or sth. Sticker the links to 3 tinkering/DIY communities on your local bike repair shop.

Links are as important as streets are to traffic. They get us from A to B. don't underbuild them.

142 points · 17 comments · view on lemmy.world

17 Comments

Zarxrax@lemmy.world · 34 pts · 138d (8 replies)

Maybe we need web directories again, like what Yahoo originally was.

gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 10 pts · 138d (7 replies)

i'm too young for that :D

tyler@programming.dev · 17 pts · 138d (2 replies)

So you don’t know the wonders of geocities or stumbleupon then?

AlchemicalAgent@mander.xyz · 12 pts · 138d

Oh man, I miss the early days of Stumbleupon. So many unique sites.

BlindFrog@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 137d

Stumbleupon was the best.

Took me to a site once, where a person would write out what they're dealing with, and a random other person would send them an existing song. I assume it was all anonymous.

Like this one person posted about dealing with a horrible aunt, and I sent back Jonathan Coulton's "Someone is Crazy"

Auster@thebrainbin.org · 1 pts · 137d (3 replies)

Going by wording, sounds like what Piefed and Bluesky do? A bundle of communities/profiles by common interest?

Auster@thebrainbin.org · 1 pts · 137d
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Auster@thebrainbin.org · 1 pts · 137d

Asked some AI, and appears to be that, though please correct me if I'm wrong.

But going by that, starting from the fediverse, maybe people could try to make a trend like "My Web Directory" / #MyWebDirectory, where he/she posts a list of recommended small sites? On microblog platforms, usually they seem to allow users to have pinned posts, and on threaded platforms, maybe the link to a post could be included in their bio or something.

Panda@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 136d

It's like phone books were for phone numbers. A categorised directory that allowed you to easily find the types of websites you were interested in.

RegularJoe@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 138d

This is a serious problem for the Internet. While there are sites like https://512kb.club/ (it features lightweight websites with content), but there's not an easy way to learn about new or niche sites.

According to https://growthbadger.com/traffic-study/ from April 5, 2020 (yes, it's 6 years old)

What 3.25 Billion Website Visits Tell Us About the Internet’s Top Traffic Sources

  1. Search is the single largest online traffic source, driving well over 50% of most industries’ web traffic.
  1. Google drives 8 times more traffic than all social media networks combined.
  1. The average top blog gets 66.47% of its traffic from search, of which 99.77% is organic and only 0.23% is paid.
  1. In almost every industry, Facebook still sends more traffic than all other social networks. The two exceptions are Design and Development (for which the top network is YouTube) and Crypto (for which it is Twitter).
  1. The niche that is most reliant on Google is Health and Medical, with 87.85% of its traffic coming from search.
  1. The niche that is least reliant on Google is Crypto, with 45.74% of its traffic coming from search.
  1. Facebook delivers 65.36% of all social media traffic: more visits per month than all other social networks combined.
  1. Instagram drives very little traffic: under 1% overall across all niches. Even fashion and beauty brands that were launched by Instagram influencers (e.g. Kylie Cosmetics) receive less than 5% of their monthly visits from Instagram — while search brings in about 10 times as many.
  1. The niche that is most reliant on Facebook is Business and Marketing, which gets 13.52% of its traffic from the network.
  1. Reddit drives over 3 times as much traffic to blogs as YouTube.
favoredponcho@lemmy.zip · 13 pts · 137d (1 reply)
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br3d@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 137d

Yes, and also marginalia-search.com

jtrek@startrek.website · 11 pts · 138d (3 replies)

There was someone a while ago who was trying to get a web ring going for like nerd stuff. They said so many of their friends and people they talked to loved the idea, but no one made a site of their own.

I posted it in a local community group, and everyone said the same thing.

AlchemicalAgent@mander.xyz · 6 pts · 138d

Alright, I'm in. I've been looking for something to host on my domain root. New weekend project!

gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 138d (1 reply)

yeah making content is a lot of work. i can't blame them.

AlchemicalAgent@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 137d

For sure. I'm going the easy route and just making a webring host site first. Testing out a few codebases right now and should have something this week.

robert.meyer86@piefed.social · 10 pts · 137d (1 reply)
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gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 137d

i mean you can already put a link to your blog in your user profile on lemmy. in fact many people do it. (i don't do it myself because i don't have a good website to link to)

palordrolap@fedia.io · 6 pts · 137d (1 reply)

Webrings need to make a comeback.

gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 137d

yeah, exactly. for example, in the sidebar (community description) of lemmy communities.

or in your personal profile description

hoagecko@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 137d
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