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.
The simple explanation is your instance doesn’t “know” what’s out there. lemmy.world doesn’t know when lemmy.ml adds a community, and it doesn’t know when hypothetical.server pops up as a new instance. There’s not really a good way of knowing that without having a central repository, which defeats the purpose of a centralized platform.
One thing you can do is use Lemmy Explorer to search for communities on other instances and subscribe to them. This will fill up All for everyone on your instance.
Looks to me like lemmy explorer could just be sourced for results fairly easy. Even if it was just added as an additional source to the default listings. Similar to setting up yum repos etcetera. Is there a good reason this isn’t a thing? I know my use and exposure to communities is severely limited by the current cluster fuck of finding communities. I just don’t care enough to go further than searching in the app and closing out if nothing shows up. I realize my laziness contributes to my user experience but saying an instance doesn’t know what’s out there and then providing a site that will let me search for what’s out there doesn’t seem logical.
You could always write something and submit a merge request:
https://github.com/LemmyNet
Based on my reading of the other comments here their is a huge push against this type of functionality from folks that understand the service better than I do. I doubt any contributions from an outside perspective would be at all welcomed.
It should be able to search a list of communities available on other servers its federated with.
This would be a very simple feature to implement and should not cause significant overhead.