How does the search function work and why does it sometimes not work from different instances when searching All?

In other words -

  • I search for a community that exists on Lemmy instance A (e.g. midwest.social) from Lemmy instance B (e.g. lemmy.ml) and it finds it.
  • I search for that same community from Lemmy instance C (e.g. lemmy.one), and it doesn’t find it.
  • Lemmy instance A, B, and C are all connected / federated.
  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I encountered this while trying to set up my community subscriptions on lemmy.world, which is a very new server and had few people subscribing to remote communities when I joined. Here’s my comment outlining the behavior:

    https://lemmy.world/comment/1692

    Summarizing:

    • Federating with a remote instance does NOT seem to add all it’s communities to your local instance’s list. Immediately after federation, most communities will be missing from /communities/ on the local instance, and keyword searches on the local instance for the community will return no results.
    • Searching for a community using its url or bang-prefixed-id causes the local instance to “discover” that particular remote community. It now shows up in /communities and keyword searches.

    Also, as others have mentioned, there’s https://browse.feddit.de/ for a distributed community search, though it seems to take some time for new communities to show up there. As an established instance, I also find lemmy.ml’s community search useful for discovering communities even though that’s not where my account is. “Most” big communities have been added to it’s list by someone organically searching for them by bang-id or url.