Think about things from the point of view of someone who has never used Reddit or the fediverse, but you've heard about them both from recent news articles and want to see what they are about.
Reddit:- You Google Reddit and your first result is Reddit.com. You click the link and are presented with the front page. You from scroll from a few hours and end up signing up and staying.
Lemmy:- You Google Lemmy and your first result is a wiki article for Lemmy Kilmister... Your second result might be join-lemmy.org, which you're smart enough to realise it's probably more likely what the news is about.
You click join-lemmy.org and are presented with a page of information about the fediverse, links to set up a server and pictures of code...
There is very little chance you're going to investigate further.
If we want the fediverse to replace Reddit then either
A) Lemmy needs to improve its initial impression and Search engine optimization
B) We should be promoting a different platform with a better initial first impression.
I'd recommend kbin personally as it gives the same sort of experience as Reddit from the initial interaction.
Everything you’ve said is correct, however, there is an issue that the “this all just the fediverse” doesn’t address: when I’m looking for niche info about something, I usually add either “reddit” or “site:reddit.com” to the end of a web search, but with the fediverse, it’s kinda hard to replicate that. Adding “lemmy” or “kbin” to the web search wouldn’t exactly yield every possible result on the threadiverse since not every threadiverse instance uses those words in neither the URL nor the website itself. How would you handle that specific issue?
I don't know, and I think that's a fair point...
Of course, part of the reason that Reddit is so easy to find on Google is because it's already a huge and established website with lots of traffic. It's never easy for a new site to compete with established players in terms of search engine results, and I think the bulk of that problem lies with the search engine providers themselves.
The problem we have then is that search engines won't change for the Fediverse. Maybe the SearXNG people could at least add the biggest instances as "preferred" targets in the search results or something. We probably won't have a perfect solution for a while.