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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?
While it has problems of its own, instances could pool and share that knowledge. The first time an instance talks to a different insta ce it could just ask "hey, what other instances are you aware of?". The main issue there is just instances obsessively sending exponentially growing lists of instances back and forth.
But no, that is the main bane of federated social media, discoverability without a center of truth
yup! 100% agree! federation is kind of a new thing and we have some issues to work out that’s for sure!
heck, i could even see some kind of federated search service: activitypub instances could submit their content for indexing and individual instance could choose an existing, or run their own federated fediverse search… importantly, there would need to be choice for each individual instance with no centralised repository