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.
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.
I would suggest that instances should have settings that allow them to decide whether to “advertise” a community list. With configurable settings like "all, “most active”, “top X”, or even a manually maintained list depending on the admins and instances preferences.
Then your home instance, when searching, should have it’s own settings to decide what results it’s going to ping other servers for. Big/popular/high confidence instances can have an open all/all relationship, while you might query only the top 10 communities from unknown or new instances to handle the scenario you describe.
Federation can be binary yes/no but there should be room to add more logic around enabling search on communities from your instance and controlling the search results from other instances. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive, unless I fundamentally misunderstand how federation works!