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.
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.
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!
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.
Uh… no it’s not.
I’m sorry, but what you’re doing is actively making this service harder to use by suggesting that ‘all’ should only mean ‘the communities other community members have subscribed to that contain that string.’
Where do the community members even find the the ones to subscribe to? Oh, they use a third-party service or ‘just know’ because… whatever reason.
Gee, fediverse design strikes again. Sorry, it has to be said. It really does.
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.
Winning tactic. I’d like to stay a place with people with knowledge and interesting viewpoint, regardless of their ability to find search services on other websites to locate content.
At this very moment, there is a choice between two options
- an easy to use place managed by a company that see user data as resources to be sold to advertisers
- an emerging platform where some features are still being implemented, but without any tracking of its users, and managed by volunteers
Hopefully in the near future some features such as the one highlighted by OP will be integrated in the platform, but right now, it’s not, which is why I said that if people cannot search a bit about the current state of Lemmy, they should probably head back to Reddit. And I say that hoping that once the platform is polished enough, they’ll come back.
How does posting and reading posts work - and how do you know that nobody tracks their users? I was under the assumption that admins of a node have totals access to data going in/out/through their instance.
Just have a look at the data accessed by the apps, both stores display them. It’s something else than the Reddit app.
There might be some data agregation on the server side indeed, but compared to the ads promotion machine than Reddit has become (and even announced openly, with subreddits now being platform to promote products), it’s a completely different story.
What app? As far as I’m concerned there’s no reason to believe that fediverse users aren’t tracked. Probably not all, but where there’s users interacting with each other discussing different subjects there’s money to be made, and data to sell to AI companies for training.
