I never knew there was a distinction, thanks!

Applies to tires also, and for the same reason.

Yeah, I think I did misconstrue the actual issue. SEO might not be as strong, but everything can be searched just as well. Great!

Okay, sounds like I did misunderstand. I’m happy to be wrong, thanks for explaining!

Right, I may be totally misunderstanding the problem.

If it’s just that lemmy needs time and interaction from the community to build that knowledge, then great! No problem. But what I understood was that lemmy’s communities and conversations simply aren’t made accessible to wide-searching like that.

Yes and no. My daily scrolling habit has been moved to lemmy and I haven’t really felt any loss.

However, and this is a big caveat: Reddit remains a huge source of institutional knowledge. Half a dozen times weekly I’ll look something up and the most relevant answer/discussion will be from Reddit. As I understand it, lemmy will never fulfill this need, because it’s not scraped the same way Reddit is? Or perhaps I’ve misunderstood something about the way federation works. If that’s true, it’s a huge blow to the long-term use of lemmy v. Reddit.