Part of the utility of Reddit to me was the ability to append “Reddit” to searches and be served relevant threads to my search query since Reddit was one of the last places to get information from real people. This has proven to be invaluable in troubleshooting. Is this possible with Lemmy or the greater Fediverse? As we pick up more users and content, it’s my hope I could do the same with Lemmy.
Or is it more like Discord where information isn’t indexed by search engines? One thing I’ve always despised about Discord is the inability to find information if you don’t belong to the communities that produce it and I’m hoping that’s not the case here.
Hopefully this isn’t too silly of a question I’m still trying to wrap my head around how all this works.
You would have gotten your answer by asking google that exact same question - yes.
But the way federation works is terrible for search engine optimization as it fragments the userbase to a million smaller sites - instead of whatever hundreds of thousands of overall lemmy users there is, Google will only see the few top ones as being anything relevant. For the kind of search where you add “Lemmy” at the end like you can with reddit, it is (currently) probably better to use “site:lemmy.world” as it is by far the largest one.