1y ago

Why doesn't lemmy show communities in the 'all' section unless people from your server are already subscribed to him?

It's excruciatingly obnoxious to have to rely on third party sources for what should be a first-party feature.

Like, I select all and then search a query. "Oh no, nobody on your server used a third party service to find it, so you won't see it here."

Like, how short-sighted is that, really? If I search for a string in the 'all' servers, I should have a list of 'all' the servers containing that string.

It's a really simple concept. Not sure why this post even has to be made, but I'm wondering if there's something I can do to make these 'features' more intuitive.

18 comments

totally understand the frustration, and i’m not going to try and invalidate it!
… however, it’s definitely not a problem with a simple solution
since anyone can start an instance, when you search “all”, where should it search? i don’t mean generally like “all the instances”, i mean where specifically? things like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin.social, etc are obvious… but what about lemmy.mydomainforfriends.social (not real but let’s pretend someone created their own little instance for friends there!)?
let’s say you say yes that should be searched, okay… how does your instance know it’s there? does it tell all other instances that it exists at some point? where does IT get that list from? (the current solution to this is that your instance starts to “know about” an instance after someone interacts with it, but this has the problem you’ve described)
let’s say that instance shouldn’t be searched… now, what are the rules (automatic id assume; not with human intervention) that would allow an instance to be added to some big list somewhere? also where is that list? now we’re back at problem 1: how do you store a federated list of servers?
the problem gets even harder when you consider mastodon, pixelfed, peertube, etc… all these services interact: should all include them? only certain things in them?
- since anyone can start an instance, when you search “all”, where should it search?
  Easy! It should search all the servers your server is federated with! Servers should contain a list of their community names that can be easily and quickly queried by other servers.
  
  Federation isn't opt-in though. It would be VERY easy to spin up a bunch of instances with millions or billions of fake communities and use them to DDOS a server's search function.
  Searching current active subscriptions helps mitigate that vector a little.

What does 'All' mean to you?
In this context it means all posts which are stored on the server you are on. And only things are stored which people subscribed to. It does not mean "‘all’ servers".
There are good reasons why the protocol has been designed like that, if you're interested then you can find out about it. If not, reddit still exists for people who like it more.
- All means all. If it isn’t actually All (it isn’t) then it should be called something else.
  
  But it is all, just not the all you think, it's all things the server is aware of, not all things in the universe.

Someone will implement it.
The protocol itself is decentralized. Which is good.
If a app wants to use a central service to search thats a option available to them.
- Userbase don’t care about how the tech works under the hood - user base sees no content and goes back to Reddit.
  
  If they can't bother with investigating the platform for 10 minutes, I think they should stay on Reddit and keep complaining about the awful app and website over there.

18 comments